But Asher needed none of this train of logic, which flickered through his mind in fragments of a second,

to know all was not well. The years had taught him the smell of peril, and the house stank of it

Keeping to the tangle of vine that overgrew the garden wall, con-scious of those darkened windows overlooking him from above, he edged toward the kitchen door.

Most of the young men whom Asher tutored in philology, etymology, and comparative folklore at New College-which had not, in fact, been new since the latter half of the fourteenth century-regarded their men-tor with the affectionate respect they would have accorded a slightly eccentric uncle. Asher played to this image sheerly from force of habit -it had stood him in good stead abroad. He was a reasonably unobtru-sive man, taller than he seemed at first glance and, as Lydia generally expressed it, brown: brown hair, brown eyes, brown mustache, brown clothes, and brown mien. Without his University gown, he looked, in fact, like a clerk, except for the sharpness of his eyes and the silence with which he moved. It would have been coincidence, the undergradu-ates would have said, that he found the deepest shadow in the dark and dew-soaked garden in which to stow his gown and mortarboard cap, the antique uniform of Oxford scholarship which covered his anonymous tweeds. Certainly they would not have said that he was the sort of man who could jemmy open a window with a knife, nor that he was the sort of man who would carry such a weapon concealed in his boot.

The kitchen was utterly deserted, chilly, and smelling of the old-fashioned stone floor and of ashes long grown cold. No steam floated above the hot-water reservoir of the stove-a new American thing of black rococo iron which had cost nearly twenty-five dollars from a catalogue. The bland brightness of the gaslight, winking on the stove's nickel-plated knobs, and the silver of toast racks, made the stillness in the kitchen seem all the more ominous, like a smiling maniac with an ax behind his back.