I pulled on boots and a coat and went outside into the blackness.

I could not see my hand in front of my face. Nothing to hear but the squelch of my boots on the lawn. And then I caught a trace of it. A harsh, unmusical sound; not an instrument, but an atonal, discordant human voice.

Slowly and with frequent stops I tracked the notes. I went down the long borders and turned into the garden with the pond-at least I think that is where I went. Then I mistook my way, blundered across soft soil where I thought a path should be, and ended up not beside the yew as I expected, but in a patch of knee-high shrubs with thorns that caught at my clothes. From then on I gave up trying to work out where I was, took my bearings from my ears alone, followed the notes like Ariane 's thread through a labyrinth I had ceased to recognize. It sounded at irregular intervals, and each time I would head toward it, until the silence stopped me and I paused, waiting for a new clue. How long did I stumble after it in the dark? Was it a quarter of an hour? Half an hour? All I know is that at the end of that time I found myself back at the very door by which I had left the house. I had come-or been led-full circle.

The silence was very final. The notes had died, and in their place, the rain started again. Instead of going in, I sat on the bench, rested my head on my crossed arms, feeling the rain tap on my back, my neck, my hair.

It began to seem a foolish thing to have gone chasing about the garden after something so insubstantial, and I managed to persuade myself, almost, that I had heard nothing but the creation of my own imagination. Then my thoughts turned in other directions. I wondered when my father would send me advice about searching for Hester. I thought about Angelfield and frowned: What would Aurelius do when the house was demolished? Thinking about Angelfield made me think of the ghost, and that made me think of my own ghost, the photograph I had taken of her, lost in a blur of white. I made a resolution to telephone my mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

And then my spine sent me an alarm.

A presence. Here. Now. At my side.

I jerked up and looked around.

The darkness was total. There was nothing and no one to see. Everything, even the great oak, had been swallowed up in the darkness, and the world had shrunk to the eyes that were watching me and the wild frenzy of my heart.

Not Miss Winter. Not here. Not at this time of night.

Then who?

I felt it before I felt it. The touch against my side-the here and gone again- It was the cat, Shadow. Again he nudged me, another cheek rub against my ribs, and a meow, rather tardily, to announce himself. I reached out my hand and stroked him, while my heart attempted to find a rhythm. The cat purred. "You're all wet," I told him. "Come on, silly. It's no night to be out."

He followed me to my room, licked himself dry while I wrapped my hair in a towel, and we fell asleep together on the bed. For once-perhaps it was the cat's protection-my dreams kept well away.

The next day was dull and gray. After my regular interview, I took myself for a walk in the garden. I tried in the dismal light of early afternoon to retrace the path I had taken by dead of night. The beginning was easy enough: down the long borders and into the garden with the pond. But after that I lost my track. My memory of stepping across the soft wet soil of a flower bed had me stumped, for every bed and border was pristinely raked and in order. Still, I made a few haphazard guesses, one or two random decisions, and took myself on a roughly circular route that might or might not have mirrored, in part at least, my nighttime stroll.

I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Unless you count the fact that I came across Maurice, and for once he spoke to me. He was kneeling over a section of churned-up soil, straightening and smoothing and putting right. He felt me come onto the lawn behind him and looked up. "Damn foxes," he growled. And turned back to his work.

I returned to the house and began transcribing the morning's interview.

THE EXPERIMENT

The day of the medical examination came, and Dr. Maudsley presented himself at the house. As usual Charlie was not there to welcome the visitor. Hester had informed him of the doctor's visit in her usual way (a letter left outside his rooms on a tray), and having heard no more about it, assumed quite correctly that he took no interest in the matter.

The patient was in one of her sullen but unresisting moods. She allowed herself to be led into the room where the examination took place, and submitted to being poked and prodded. Invited to open her mouth and stick out her tongue, she would not, but at least when the doctor stuck his fingers in her mouth and physically separated upper from lower jaw to peer in, she did not bite him. Her eyes slid away from him and his instruments; she seemed scarcely aware of him and his examination. She could not be induced to speak a single word.

Dr. Maudsley found his patient to be underweight and to have lice; otherwise she was physically healthy in every respect. Her psychological state, however, was more difficult to determine. Was the child, as John-the-dig implied, mentally deficient? Or was the girl's behavior caused by parental neglect and lack of discipline? This was the view of the Missus, who, publicly at least, was inclined always to absolve the twins.

These were not the only opinions the doctor had in mind when he examined the wild twin. The previous night in his own house, pipe in mouth, hand on fireplace, he had been musing aloud about the case (he enjoyed having his wife listen to him; it inspired him to greater eloquence), enumerating the instances of misbehavior he had heard of. There had been the thieving from villagers' cottages, the destruction of the topiary garden, the violence wrought upon Emmeline, the fascination with matches. He had been pondering the possible explanations when the soft voice of his wife broke in. "You don't think she is simply wicked?"

For a moment he was too surprised at being interrupted to answer.

"It's only a suggestion," she said with a wave of her hand, as if to discount her words. She had spoken mildly, but that hardly mattered. The fact that she had spoken at all was enough to give her words an edge.

And then there was Hester.

"What you must bear in mind," she had told him, "is that in the absence of any strong parental attachment, and with no strong guidance from any other quarter, the child's development to date has been wholly shaped by the experience of twinness. Her sister is the one fixed and permanent point in her consciousness; therefore her entire worldview will have been formed through the prism of their relationship."

She was quite right, of course. He had no idea what book she had got it out of, but she must have read it closely, for she elaborated on the idea very sensibly. As he listened, he had been rather struck by her queer little voice. Despite its distinctively feminine pitch it had more than a little masculine authority about it. She was articulate. She had an amusing habit of expressing views of her own with the same measured command as when she was explaining a theory by some authority she had read. And when she paused for breath at the end of a sentence, she would give him a quick look-he had found it disconcerting the first time, though now he thought it rather droll-to let him know whether he was allowed to speak or whether she intended to go on speaking herself.

"I must do some more research," he told Hester when they met to discuss the patient after the examination. "And I shall certainly look very closely at the significance of her being a twin."