Docilely following the terse instructions in their guidebook, they turned left at the County Laboratory, walked down the narrow, high-walled passage to its end, and mounted the flight of steps. When they had done so, they found themselves in a parking lot.

This, their book informed them, is the site of No. 7 Shire Hall Place, where Hardy lived from June 1883 until June 1885-now, it added unnecessarily, a car park.

From there they were directed to a gray stone mansion called Colliton House, the prototype for Lucetta’s house, High Place Hall.

Gideon read aloud from the guidebook. " ‘The arms over the front entry are extremely interesting: Sable, A Lion Rampant Argent, Debruised with a Bendlet Gules-’ Julie, are you really enjoying this?"

"Are you?"

It didn’t take them long to agree that they weren’t, and a quick skimming of the rest of the book gave them the happy information that nearby the river Frome, with its many Hardy associations, wends its peaceful way between shaded banks, followed closely by a rustic river path.

They decided to let the Hardy associations go for the moment and to stroll the bucolic, deserted path for its own pleasures. At their feet the tiny river babbled and purled, while a few yards beyond it rose the mossy base of the flat-topped mound on which Dorchester-or Durnovaria, as it was called in Roman times-had first been built. On the other side of the path were tidy little vegetable gardens, one after another, and beyond them, in the distance, lay lonely Durnover Moor, hazy in the pale afternoon light.

"I keep wondering why anybody would take that darn skull," Julie announced abruptly, once they’d walked quietly for a while.

"Me, too."

"It’s famous, isn’t it?"

"To physical anthropologists, yes."

"Well, isn’t it worth money then? Couldn’t it have been stolen to be sold?"