He stood there numbly for a long while, not thinking—unable to think. Finally he slipped the brooch into his pocket and moved on.

He was trembling when he reached the door of Eldoria's hut. The footprints led straight up to the threshold and came to an end. Diffidently he touched the primitive knob, turned it and pushed the door open. He stepped inside and closed the door in the faces of the three Erinyes. The remembered anteroom seemed smaller and more sordid than the original, but he knew that it was really no different. He had remembered it accurately enough. It was he who was different, not the room.

Opposite the door, Deirdre Yesterday sat immobile before the arras. Equally immobile, Blake Past sat facing her. Deirdre Yesterday's lips were parted in the midst of uttering a soundless word. The Anabasis lay open on her lap.

Blake Present found it difficult to breathe. The difficulty stemmed from a physical as well as an emotional source. Someone was burning incense.

He wiped his forehead. Then, bracing himself, he walked over to the arras, parted it and stepped into the inner room.

The inner room was empty.

A small notebook lay upon the dais among the scattered scarlet cushions. Near it was a faint depression in the foamy coverlet. Blake picked up the notebook. The first page contained a hastily written message:

Nate dearest, I've lost my nerve, and by the time you read this I shall have run away. Please forgive me for disobeying you. I wanted desperately to fulfill your wishes by going to New Earth and attending Trevor University, and now I shall, because sitting here in this little room I have faced at last the very real possibility that you really do not love me. I had hoped that by entering your mind and leading you back through our moments together to the moment when we met and by freezing that moment and letting you find me in this room, you would be shocked into associating me with Eldoria rather than with the naive little girl sitting outside the arras—with sex, rather than with saintliness; that I could bring you to understand that the little-girl image you have of me is as unrealistic as the father-image you have of yourself. But the passing moments have made me realize that all this while I have been deluding myself with false hopes and that I am merely hopelessly in love with a man who does not regard me as a woman at all, who—

Here the message broke off as abruptly as it 

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