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whose ivory sails stippled the blue water—and even when they turned to follow the Lewes road inland across the South Downs, the green fields stretched broadly away to the hills on either side, and the walls between the fields were low.
    The only jarring moment came when they were passing the north face of Windover Hill, and Crawford awoke from an uneasy doze and saw the giant figure of a man carved crudely into the chalk of the distant hillside; Crawford instantly scrambled up into a crouch on the seat and grabbed the door as if he intended to vault out of the carriage and simply run back toward the sea, but Boyd caught him and pushed him back down into the seat.
    He stared fearfully at the figure, and his companions shifted around to see what had so upset him.
    "For Christ's sake, Mike," said Boyd nervously, "it's only an old Saxon hill figure, like there's dozens of throughout these parts. The Wilmington Long Man, that lad's called. It's just a—"
    Crawford, still not completely awake, interrupted him—
"Why is it watching us?"
he whispered, staring across the miles of farmland at the pale outline on the hill.
    "You were having a dream," said Appleton a little shrilly. "What do you drink for if it gives you dreams like this?" He dug a flask out of his coat pocket, took a deep swallow, and then leaned forward and ordered the driver to go faster.
     
    Late in the afternoon they passed the first outlying stone-and-thatch cottages of Bexhill-on-Sea; a few miles farther and they were among the shaded lanes of the town, driving past rows of neat seventeenth-century houses, all built of the local honey-colored limestone. Flowers brightened the boundaries of the yards and lanes, and the house at whose gate they stopped was hardly visible from the road because of the hundreds of red and yellow roses that bobbed on vines woven around the posts of the front fence.
    As Crawford climbed down from the carriage to the grass, a boy who had been crouched beside the gate leaped to his feet and sprinted across the lawn and into the house. A few moments later the abrupt, mournful wail of a bagpipe startled birds out of the trees overhead, and Appleton, who had followed Crawford out of the carriage and was now trying to pull the wrinkles out of his coat, winced when he heard it.
    "Blood sacrifice?" he asked politely. "Planning some sort of druid rite, are you?"
    "No," said Crawford defensively, "uh, it's going to be a traditional Scottish ceremony, I understand. Wrong end of the island, of course, but . . ."
    "Christ," put in Boyd anxiously, "they're not going to make us eat those stuffed sheep stomachs, are they? What do they call it? Havoc?"
    "Haggis. No, the food'll be conventional, but . . . oh, they'll have whitened Julia's eyebrows with antimony, and I sent ahead a jar of henna so the bridesmaids could stain her feet with it after they wash them—"
    He was reaching toward the back of the carriage for his portmanteau when he froze.
    "Hey, Mike," said Boyd, leaning down from the carriage to grab Crawford's shoulder, "are you getting sick? You're suddenly pale as a low sky."
    Crawford shivered, but then continued his interrupted reach to the boot; with trembling fingers he began unbuckling the leather straps. "N-no, I'm fine," he said. "I just . . . remembered something."
    Mention of the washing of feet had brought back a hitherto-lost memory of last night—he
had
washed his feet, and taken off his muddy trousers too, after fleeing back to his room from the statue; and he hadn't cleaned up because of any particular fastidiousness, it seemed to him now, but out of an irrational fear of Sussex dirt. So he must have gone outside one more time . . . at least. He searched his memory now for any recollection of it, but could come up with nothing.
    Could he have been searching for the ring again? The question frightened him as soon as he posed it to himself, for it implied the conceivability of some
other
reason. He forced himself to