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said Nineteenth Century, and I’d expected hoop skirts, but she had on a long, greenish gown that clung to her slim body as if it were wet. Her auburn hair trailed about her shoulders and down her back like water weeds, and the whole effect was that of a Waterhouse nymph, rising like a wraith out of the dark water.
    I stood up, gawping as foolishly as the new recruit, and took off my ARP helmet, wishing I had cleaned up when the nurse told me to.
    She took hold of her long, trailing sleeve and wrung it out on the carpet. Finch grabbed a fax-mag and spread it under her.
    “Oh, good, Ned, you’re here,” Mr. Dunworthy said from the door. “Just the person I wanted to see.”
    The nymph looked at me, and her eyes were a dark clear greenish-brown, the color of a forest pool. She narrowed them. “You’re not sending that, are you?” she said to Mr. Dunworthy.
    “I’m not sending anyone. Or anything until I’ve thought about it. Now go change out of those wet clothes before you catch cold.”
    She gathered up her dripping skirts with one hand, and started out. At the door she turned back, her rosy lips open to impart some final benediction, some last word to me perhaps of love and devotion. “Don’t feed her. She’s had an entire place,” she said, and drifted out the door.
    I started after her, bewitched, but Mr. Dunworthy had his hand on my arm. “So Finch found you all right,” he said, steering me around behind Finch’s desk and into the inner office, “I was afraid you’d be off in 1940 at one of those church bazaars Lady Schrapnell keeps sending you to.”
    Outside the window I could see her crossing the quad, dripping gracefully on the pavement, a lovely . . . what were they called? Dryads? No, those were the ones that lived in trees. Sirens?
    Mr. Dunworthy came over to the window. “This is all Lady Schrapnell’s fault. Kindle’s one of my best historians. Six months with Lady Schrapnell,and look at her!” He waved his hand at me. “Look at you, for that matter. The woman’s like a high-explosive bomb!”
    The siren passed out of my vision and into the mist she had emerged from, only that wasn’t right. Sirens lived on rocks and shipwrecked sailors. And it sounded like dryads. Delphides? No, those were the ones who went about predicting doom and disaster.
    “. . . had no business sending her in the first place,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying. “I tried to tell her, but would she listen? Of course not. ‘No stone unturned,’ she says. Sends her off to the Victorian era. Sends you off to jumble sales to buy pincushions and tea towels!”
    “And calves’ foot jelly,” I said.
    “Calves’ foot jelly?” he said, looking at me curiously.
    “For the sick,” I said. “Only I don’t think the sick eat it. I wouldn’t eat it. I think they give it to the next jumble sale. It makes the rounds from year to year. Like fruitcake.”
    “Yes, well,” he said, frowning. “So now a stone has been turned, and she’s created a serious problem, which is what I wanted to see you about. Sit down, sit down,” he said, motioning me toward a leather armchair.
    Finch got there first with a fax-mag, murmuring, “So difficult to get soot out of leather.”
    “And take off your hat. Good Lord,” Mr. Dunworthy said, adjusting his spectacles, “you look dreadful. Where have you been?”
    “The soccer field,” I said.
    “I gather it was a somewhat rough game.”
    “I found him in the pedestrian gate by Merton’s playing fields,” Finch explained.
    “I thought he was in Infirmary.”
    “He climbed out the window.”
    “Ah,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “But how did he get in this condition?”
    “I was looking for the bishop’s bird stump,” I said.
    “On Merton’s playing fields?”
    “In the cathedral ruins just before he was brought to Infirmary,” Finch said helpfully.
    “Did you find it?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
    “No,” I said, “and that’s the reason I came to see you. I wasn’t able to