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stretched away rough common land, with clumps of gorse and a few bare, graceful birch saplings, to where the upper windows and thatch of a low cottage could be made out. The lighthearted vigour of the dancers, who were winding themselves round the tallest girl in a spiral like a clock spring, was contrasted with the stillness of the late-winter afternoon, its sharp clear airs and horizontal light. Crome had often watched this dance as a boy, though he had never been allowed to take part in it. He remembered the tranquil shadows on the grass, the chant, the rose and green colours of the sky. As soon as the dancers had wound the spiral tight, they would begin to tread on one another's toes, laughing and shrieking ― or, changing to a different tune, jump up and down beneath the tree while one of them shouted, "A bundle of rags!"
    It was perhaps as sentimental a picture as Audsley King had claimed. But Crome, who saw a lamb in every corner, had never seen one there; and when she came as she had promised, the woman with the insect's head found him gazing so quietly up at it from the trapezium of moonlight falling across his bed that he looked like the effigy on a tomb. She stood in the doorway, perhaps thinking he had died and escaped her.
    "I can't undo myself," he said.
    The mask glittered faintly. Did he hear her breathing beneath it? Before he could make up his mind there was a scuffling on the stairs behind her and she turned to say something he couldn't quite catch ― though it might have been: "Don't come in yourself."
    "These straps are so old," he explained. "My father ― "
    "All right, give it to me, then," she said impatiently to whoever was outside. "Now go away." And she shut the door. Footsteps went down the stairs; it was so quiet in Montrouge that you could hear them clearly going away down flight after flight, scraping in the dust on a landing, catching in the cracked linoleum. The street door opened and closed. She waited, leaning against the door, until they had gone off down the empty pavements towards Mynned and the Ghibbeline Passage, then said, "I had better untie you." But instead she walked over to the end of Crome's bed, and sitting on it with her back to him stared thoughtfully at the picture of the elder-tree dance.
    "You were clever to find this," she told him. She stood up again, and, peering at it, ignored him when he said:
    "It was in the other room when I came."
    "I suppose someone helped you," she said. "Well, it won't matter." Suddenly she demanded, "Do you like it here among the rats? Why must you live here?"
    He was puzzled.
    "I don't know."
    A shout went up in the distance, long and whispering like a deeply drawn breath. Roman candles sailed up into the night one after the other, exploding in the east below the zenith so that the collapsing pantile roofs of Montrouge stood out sharp and black. Light poured in, ran off the back of the chair and along the belly of the enamel jug, and, discovering a book or a box here, a broken pencil there, threw them into merciless relief. Yellow or gold, ruby, greenish-white: with each new pulse the angles of the room grew more equivocal.
    "Oh, it is the stadium!" cried the woman with the insect's head. "They have begun early tonight!"
    She laughed and clapped her hands. Crome stared at her.
    "Clowns will be capering in the great light!" she said.
    Quickly she undid his straps.
    "Look!"
    Propped up against the whitewashed wall by the door she had left a long brown paper parcel hastily tied with string. Fat or grease had escaped from it, and it looked as if it might contain a fish. While she fetched it for him, Crome sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his face. She carried it hieratically, across her outstretched arms, her image advancing and receding in the intermittent light.
    "I want you to see clearly what we are going to lend you."
    When the fireworks had stopped at last, an ancient white ceramic sheath came out of the