"So have I," said Henry. "I suppose in that regard my tastes are rather Hellenistic. Landlocked places interest me, remote prospects, wild country. I've never had the slightest bit of interest in the sea. Rather like what Homer says about the Arcadians, you remember? With ships they had nothing to do...."

"It's because you grew up in the Midwest," Charles said.

"But if one follows that line of reasoning, then it follows that I would love flat lands, and plains. Which I don't. The descriptions of Troy in the Iliad are horrible-all flat land and burning sun. No. I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions-Pan himself was born in the mountains, you know. And Zeus. In Parrhasia it was that Rheia bore thee," he said dreamily, lapsing into Greek, "where was a hill sheltered with the thickest brush...."

It was dark now. Around us, the countryside lay veiled and mysterious, silent in the night and fog. This was remote, untraveled land, rocky and thickly wooded, with none of the quaint appeal of Hampden and its rolling hills, its ski chalets and antique shops, but high and perilous and primitive, everything black and desolate even of billboards.

Francis, who knew this territory better than we did, had said there was an inn nearby but it was hard to believe there was anything habitable for fifty miles around. Then we rounded a bend and our headlights swept across a rusted metal sign pockmarked with shotgun pellets, that informed us that the Hoosatonic Inn, straight ahead, was the original birthplace of Pie a la Mode.

The building was ringed by a rickety porch-sagging rockers, peeling paint. Inside, the lobby was an intriguing jumble of mahogany and moth-eaten velvet, interspersed with deer heads, calendars from filling stations, and a large collection of Bicentennial commemorative trivets, mounted and hung upon the wall.

The dining room was empty except for a few country people eating their dinners, all of whom looked up at us with innocent, frank curiosity as we came in, at our dark suits and spectacles, at Francis's monogrammed cufflinks and his Charvet tie, at Camilla with her boyish haircut and sleek little Astrakhan coat. I was a bit surprised at this collective openness of demeanor-neither stares nor disapproving looks-until it occurred to me that these people probably didn't realize we were from the college. Closer in, we would have been pegged instantly as rich kids from up on the hill, kids likely to make a lot of noise and leave a bad tip. But here we were only strangers, in a place where strangers were rare.

No one even came by to take an order. Dinner appeared with instantaneous magic: pork roast, biscuits, turnips and corn and butternut squash, in thick china bowls that had pictures of the presidents (up to Nixon) around their rims.

The waiter, a red-faced boy with bitten nails, lingered for a moment. Finally he said, shyly: "You folks from New York City?"

"No," said Charles, taking the plate of biscuits from Henry, "From here."

"From Hoosatonic?"

"No. Vermont, I mean."

"Not New York?"

"No," said Francis cheerily, carving at the roast. "I'm from Boston."

"I went there," said the boy, impressed.

Francis smiled absently and reached for a dish.

"You folks must like the Red Sox."

"Actually I do," said Francis. "Quite a bit. But they never seem to win, do they?"

"Some of the time they do. I guess we'll never see 'em win the Series, though."

He was still loitering, trying to think of something else to say, when Henry glanced up at him.

"Sit down," he said unexpectedly. "Have some dinner, won't you?"

After a bit of awkward demurral, he pulled up a chair, though he refused to eat anything; the dining room closed at eight, he told us, and it wasn't likely that anyone else would come in. "We're off the highway," he said. "Most folks go to bed pretty early around here." His name, we discovered, was John Deacon; he was my age-twenty-and had graduated from Equinox High School, over in Hoosatonic proper, only two years before. Since graduation, he said, he'd been working on his uncle's farm; the waiter's job was a new thing, something to fill the winter hours. "This is only my third week," he said. "I like it here, I reckon. Food's good. And I get my meals free."

Henry, who generally disliked and was disliked by hoi polloi-a category which in his view expanded to include persons ranging from teenagers with boom boxes to the Dean of Studies of Hampden, who was independently wealthy and had a degree in American Studies from Yale-nonetheless had a genuine knack with poor people, simple people, country folk; he was despised by the functionaries of Hampden but admired by its janitors, its gardeners and cooks. Though he did not treat them as equals-he didn't treat anyone as an equal, exactly-neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy. "I think we're much more hypocritical about illness, and poverty, than were people in former ages," I remember Julian saying once. "In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true. Does anyone remember Plato's definition of Justice in the Republic? Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it. A poor man who wishes to rise above his station is only making himself needlessly miserable. And the wise poor have always known this, the same as do the wise rich."

I'm not entirely sure now that this is true-because if it is, where does that leave me? still wiping down windshields in Plano-? but there is no doubt that Henry was so confident of his own abilities and position in the world, and so comfortable with them, that he had the strange effect of making others (including myself) feel comfortable in their respective, lesser positions, whatever they might happen to be. Poor people for the most part were unimpressed by his manner, except in the most hazy and admiring fashion; and as a consequence they were able to see past it to the real Henry, the Henry I knew, taciturn, polite, in many respects as simple and straightforward as they themselves were. It was a knack he shared with Julian, who was greatly admired by the country people who lived around him, much as one likes to imagine that kindly Pliny was held in affection by the poor folk of Comum and Tifernum.

Through most of the meal, Henry and the boy talked in the most intimate and, to me, baffling terms, about the land around Hampden and Hoosatonic-zoning, developments, price per acre, uncleared land and titles and who owned what-as the rest of us ate our dinners and listened. It was a conversation one might overhear at any rural filling station or feed store; but hearing it made me feel curiously happy, and at ease with the world.

In retrospect, it is odd how little power the dead farmer exercised over an imagination as morbid and hysterical as my own. I can well imagine the extravagance of nightmares such a thing might provoke (opening the door to a dream-classroom, the flannel-shirted figure without a face propped ghoulishly at a desk, or turning from its work at the blackboard to grin at me), but I suppose it is rather telling that I seldom thought of it at all and then only when I was reminded in some way. I believe the others were troubled by it as little as or less than I was, as evidenced by the fact that they all had carried on so normally and in such good humor for so long. Monstrous as it was, the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry's feet, to be discovered when the lights came up; the picture of it, staring and dumb in all its gore, never failed to provoke an anxious little frisson but still it seemed relatively harmless compared to the very real and persistent menace which I now saw that Bunny presented.

Bunny, for all his appearance of amiable, callous stability, was actually a wildly erratic character. There were any number of reasons for this, but primary among them was his complete inability to think about anything before he did it. He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum. But his instincts had failed him in the new set of circumstances presented by the murder. Now that the old trusted channel-markers had, so to speak, been rearranged in the dark, the automatic-pilot mechanism by which his psyche navigated was useless; decks awash, he floundered aimlessly, running on sandbars, veering off in all sorts of bizarre directions.

To the casual observer, I suppose, he seemed pretty much his jolly old self-slapping people on the back, eating Twinkies and HoHos in the reading room of the library and dropping crumbs all down in the bindings of his Greek books. But behind that bluff facade some distinct and rather ominous changes were taking place, changes of which I was already dimly aware but which made themselves more evident as time went on.

In some respects, it was as if nothing had happened at all. We went to our classes, did our Greek, and generally managed to pretend among one another and everybody else that things were all right. At the time it heartened me that Bunny, in spite of his obviously disturbed state of mind, nonetheless continued to follow the old routine so easily. Now, of course, I see that the routine was all that held him together. It was his one remaining point of reference and he clung to it with a fierce Pavlovian tenacity, partly through habit and partly because he had nothing with which to replace it. I suppose the others sensed that the continuation of the old rituals was in some respects a charade for Bunny's benefit, kept up in order to soothe him, but I did not, nor did I have any idea how disturbed he really was until the following event took place.

We were spending the weekend at Francis's house. Aside from the barely perceptible strain which manifested itself in all dealings with Bunny at that time, things seemed to be going smoothly and he'd been in a good mood at dinner that night. When I went to bed he was still downstairs, drinking wine left from dinner and playing backgammon with Charles, to all appearances his usual self; but some time in the middle of the night I was awakened by a loud, incoherent bellowing, from down the corridor in Henry's room.

I sat up in bed and switched on the light.

"You don't care about a goddamn thing, do you?" I heard Bunny scream; this was followed by a crash, as if of books being swept from desk to floor. "Not a thing but your own fucking self, you and all the rest of them-I'd like to know just what Julian would think, you bastard, if I told him a couple of-Don't touch me," he shrieked, "get away-!"

More crashing, as of furniture overturned, and Henry's voice, quick and angry. Bunny's rose above it. "Go ahead!" he shouted, so loudly I'm sure he woke the house. "Try and stop me. I'm not scared of you. You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew-"

Yet another crash, this time of splintering wood. A door slammed. There were rapid footsteps down the hall. Then the muffled noise of sobs-gasping, terrible sobs which went on for a long while.

About three o'clock, when everything was quiet and I was just about to go back to sleep, I heard soft footsteps in the hall and, after a pause, a knock at my door. It was Henry.

"Goodness," he said distractedly, looking around my room, at the unmade four-poster bed and my clothes scattered on the rug beside it. "I'm glad you're awake. I saw your light."

"Jesus, what was all that about?"

He ran a hand through his rumpled hair. "What do you suppose?" he said, looking up at me blankly. "I don't know, really. I must have done something to set him off, though for the life of me I don't know what. I was reading in my room, and he came in and wanted a dictionary. In fact, he asked me to look something up, and-You wouldn't happen to have an aspirin, would you?"

I sat on the side of my bed and rustled through the drawer of the night table, through the tissues and reading glasses and Christian Science leaflets belonging to one of Francis's aged female relatives. "I don't see any," I said. "What happened?"

He sighed and sat down heavily in an armchair. "There's aspirin in my room," he said. "In a tin in my overcoat pocket. Also a blue enamel pillbox. And my cigarettes. Will you go get them for me?"

He was so pale and shaken I wondered if he was ill. "What's the matter?" I said.

"I don't want to go in there."

"Why not?"

"Because Bunny's asleep on my bed."

I looked at him. "Well, Jesus," I said. "I'm not going to-"

He waved away my words with a tired hand. "It's all right. Really. I'm just too upset to go myself. He's fast asleep."

I went quietly out of my room and down the hall. Henry's door was at the end. Pausing outside with one hand on the knob, I heard distinctly from within the peculiar huffing noise of Bunny's snores.

In spite of what I'd heard earlier, I was unprepared for what I saw: books were scattered in a frenzy across the floor; the night table was knocked over; against the wall lay the splay-legged remains of a black Malacca chair. The shade of the pole lamp was askew and cast a crazy irregular light over the room. In the middle of it was Bunny, his face resting on the tweed elbow of his jacket and one foot, still in its wing-tipped shoe, dangling off the edge of the bed. Mouth open, his eyes swollen and unfamiliar without their spectacles, he snuffed and grumbled in his sleep. I grabbed up Henry's things and left as fast as I could.

Bunny came down late the next morning, puff-eyed and sullen, while Francis and the twins and I were eating our breakfasts. He ignored our awkward greetings and went straight to the cabinet and made himself a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and sat down wordlessly at the table. In the abrupt silence which had fallen, I heard Mr. Hatch come in the front door. Francis excused himself and hurried away, and I heard the two of them murmuring in the hall as Bunny crunched morosely at his cereal. A few minutes passed. I was looking, obliquely, at Bunny slumped over his bowl when all of a sudden, in the window behind his head, I saw the distant figure of Mr. Hatch, walking across the open field beyond the garden, carrying the dark, curlicued ruins of the Malacca chair to the rubbish heap.

As troubling as they were, these eruptions of hysteria were infrequent. But they made it plain how upset Bunny was, and how disagreeable he might make himself if provoked. It was Henry he was angriest at, Henry who had betrayed him, and Henry who was always the subject of these outbursts. Yet in a funny way, it was Henry he was best able to tolerate on a daily basis. He was more or less constantly irritated with everyone else. He might explode at Francis, say, for making some remark he found pretentious, or become inexplicably enraged if Charles offered to buy him an ice-cream; but he did not pick these petty fights with Henry in quite the same trivial, arbitrary way. This was in spite of the fact that Henry did not take nearly the pains to placate him that everyone else did. When the subject of the barge tour came up-and it came up fairly often-Henry played along in only the most perfunctory way, and his replies were mechanical and forced. To me, Bunny's confident anticipation was more chilling than any outburst; how could he possibly delude himself into thinking that the trip would come about, that it would be anything but a nightmare if it did? But Bunny, happy as a mental patient, would rattle for hours about his delusions of the Riviera, oblivious to a certain tightness about Henry's jaw, or to the empty, ominous silences which fell when he was talked out and sat, chin in hand, staring dreamily into space.

It seemed, for the most part, that he sublimated his anger toward Henry into his dealings with the rest of the world. He was insulting, rude, quick to start a quarrel with virtually everyone he came in contact with. Reports of his behavior drifted back to us through various channels. He threw a shoe at some hippies playing Hackysack outside his window; he threatened to beat up his neighbor for playing the radio too loudly; he called one of the ladies in the Bursar's office a troglodyte. It was fortunate for us, I suppose, that his wide circle of acquaintance included few people whom he saw on a regular basis. Julian saw as much of Bunny as anyone, but their relation did not extend much beyond the classroom. More troublesome was his friendship with his old schoolmate Cloke Rayburn; and most troublesome of all, Marion.

Marion, we knew, recognized the difference in Bunny's behavior as clearly as we did, and was puzzled and angered by it. If she'd seen the way he was around us, she doubtless would have realized that she was not the cause; but as it was she saw only the broken dates, the mood swings, the sullenness and the quick irrational angers which apparently were directed solely at her-Was he seeing another girl? Did he want to break up? An acquaintance at the Early Childhood Center told Camilla that one day at work Marion had called Bunny six times, and the last time he had hung up on her.

"God, please God, let her give him the old heave-ho," said Francis, turning his eyes to heaven, when he heard this bit of intelligence. Nothing more was said of it, but we watched them carefully and prayed that it would be so. If he had his wits about him Bunny surely would keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.

Cloke he saw rather less frequently. He and Bunny had little in common besides their prep school, and Cloke-who ran with a fast crowd, and took a lot of drugs besides-was fairly self-preoccupied, not likely to concern himself with Bunny's behavior or even to take much notice of it. Cloke lived in the house next door to mine, Durbinstall (nicknamed, by campus wags, "Dalmane Hall," it was the bustling center of what the administration chose to refer to as "narcotics-related activity" and one's visits there were occasionally punctuated with explosions and small fires, incurred by lone free-basers or the student chemists who worked in the basement) and, fortunately for us, he lived in the front, on the ground floor. Since his shades were always up and there were no trees in the immediate area, it was possible to sit safely on the porch of the library, some fifty feet away, and enjoy a luxurious and unobscured view of Bunny, framed in a bright window as he gazed open-mouthed at comic books or talked, arms waving, with an invisible Cloke.

"I just like to have an idea," Henry explained, "where he goes." But actually it was quite simple to keep tabs on Bunny: I think because he, too, was unwilling to let the others, and Henry in particular, out of his sight for long.

If he treated Henry with deference, it was the rest of us who were forced to bear the wearing, day-to-day brunt of his anger. Most of the time he was simply irritating: for example, in his ill-informed and frequent tirades against the Catholic Church. Bunny's family was Episcopalian, and my parents, as far as I knew, had no religious affiliation at all; but Henry and Francis and the twins had been reared as Catholics; and though none of them went to church much, Bunny's ignorant, tireless stream of blasphemies enraged them. With leers and winks he told stories about lapsed nuns, sluttish Catholic girls, pederastic priests ("So then, this Father What's-His-Name, he said to the altar boy-this kid is nine years old, mind you, he's in my Cub Scout troop-he says to Tim Mulrooney, 'Son, would you like to see where me and all the other fathers sleep at night?' "). He invented outrageous stories of the perversions of various Popes; informed them of little-known points of Catholic doctrine; raved about Vatican conspiracies, ignoring Henry's bald refutations and Francis's muttered asides about social-climbing Protestants.

What was worse was when he chose to zero in on one person in particular. With some preternatural craftiness he always knew the right nerve to touch, at exactly the right moment, to wound and outrage most. Charles was good-natured, and slow to anger, but he was sometimes so disturbed by these anti-Catholic diatribes that his very teacup would clatter upon its saucer. He was also sensitive to remarks about his drinking. As a matter of fact, Charles did drink a lot. We all did: but still, though he didn't indulge in any very conspicuous excess, I'd frequently had the experience of smelling liquor on his breath at odd hours or dropping by unexpectedly in the early afternoon to find him with a glass in his hand-which was perhaps understandable, things being what they were. Bunny made a show of fraudulent, infuriating concern, peppered with snide comments about drunkards and sots. He kept exaggerated tallies of Charles's cocktail consumption. He left questionnaires ("Do you sometimes feel you need a drink to get through the day?") and pamphlets (freckle-faced child gazing plaintively at parent, asking, "Mommy, what's 'drunk'?") anonymously in Charles's box, and once went so far as to give his name to the campus chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon Charles was deluged with tracts and phone calls and even a personal visit from a well-meaning Twelfth-Stepper.

With Francis, on the other hand, things were more pointed and unpleasant. Nobody said anything about it, ever, but we all knew he was gay. Though he was not promiscuous, every so often he would disappear quite mysteriously at a party and once, very early in our acquaintance, he'd made a subtle but unmistakable pass at me one afternoon when we were drunk and by ourselves in the rowboat. I'd dropped an oar, and in the confusion of retrieving it I felt his fingertips brush in a casual yet deliberate fashion along my cheek near the jawbone. I glanced up, startled, and our eyes met in that way that eyes will, and we looked at each other for a moment, the boat wobbling around us and the lost oar forgotten. I was dreadfully flustered; embarrassed, I looked away; when suddenly, and to my great surprise, he burst out laughing at my distress.

"No?" he said.

"No," I said, relieved.

It might seem that this episode would have imposed a certain coolness upon our friendship. While I don't suppose that anyone who has devoted much energy to the study of Classics can be very much disturbed by homosexuality, neither am I particularly comfortable with it as it concerns me directly. Though I liked Francis well enough, I had always been nervous around him; oddly, it was this pass of his that cleared the air between us. I suppose I knew it was inevitable, and dreaded it. Once it was out of the way I was perfectly comfortable being alone with him even in the most questionable situations-drunk, or in his apartment, or even wedged in the back seat of a car.

With Francis and Bunny it was a different story. They were happy enough to be together in company, but if one was around either of them for too long it became obvious that they seldom did things with each other and almost never spent time alone. I knew why this was; we all did. Still, it never occurred to me that they weren't genuinely fond of each other on some level, nor that Bunny's gruff jokes concealed, however beguilingly, a keen and very pointed streak of malice toward Francis in particular.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. I'd never considered, though I should have, that these crackpot prejudices of Bunny's which I found so amusing were not remotely ironic but deadly serious.

Not that Francis, in normal circumstances, wasn't perfectly able to take care of himself. He had a quick temper, and a sharp tongue, and though he could've put Bunny in his place pretty much any time he chose, he was understandably apprehensive about doing so. We were all of us painfully aware of that metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine which Bunny carried around with him day and night, and which, from time to time, he allowed us a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always with him, and he had the power to dash it to the floor whenever he pleased.

I don't really have the heart to recount all the vile things he said and did to Francis, the practical jokes, the remarks about faggots and queers, the public, humiliating stream of questions about his preference and practices: clinical and incredibly detailed ones, having to do with such things as enemas, and gerbils, and incandescent light bulbs.

"Just once," I remember Francis hissing, through clenched teeth. "Just once I'd like to ..."

But there was absolutely nothing that anyone could say or do.

One might expect that I, being at that time perfectly innocent of any crime against either Bunny or humanity, would not myself be a target of this ongoing sniper fire. Unfortunately I was, perhaps more unfortunately for him than for me. How could he have been so blind as not to see how dangerous it might be for him to alienate the one impartial party, his one potential ally? Because, as fond as I was of the others, I was fond of Bunny, too, and I would not have been nearly so quick to cast in my lot with the rest of them had he not turned on me so ferociously. Perhaps, in his mind, there was the justification of jealousy; his position in the group had started to slip at roughly the same time I'd arrived; his resentment was of the most petty and childish sort, and doubtless would never have surfaced had he not been in such a paranoid state, unable to distinguish his enemies from his friends.

By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: "Gorgeous necktie," he'd say, "that's a Hermes, isn't it?"-and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie's humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: "Richard, old man, why don't you keep any pictures of your folks around?"

It was just the sort of detail he would seize upon. His own room was filled with an array of flawless family memorabilia, all of them perfect as a series of advertisements: Bunny and his brothers, waving lacrosse sticks on a luminous black-and-white playing field; family Christmases, a pair of cool, tasteful parents in expensive bathrobes, five little yellow-haired boys in identical pajamas rolling on the floor with a laughing spaniel, and a ridiculously lavish train set, and the tree rising sumptuous in the background; Bunny's mother at her debutante ball, young and disdainful in white mink.

"What?" he'd ask with mock innocence. "No cameras in California? Or can't you have your friends seeing Mom in polyester pantsuits? Where'd your parents go to school anyway?" he'd say, interrupting before I could interject. "Are they Ivy League material? Or did they go to some kind of a State U?"

It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty. My lies about my family were adequate, I suppose, but they could not stand up under these glaring attacks. Neither of my parents had finished high school; my mother did wear pants suits, which she purchased at a factory outlet. In the only photograph I had of her, a snapshot, she squinted blurrily at the camera, one hand on the Cyclone fence and the other on my father's new riding lawn mower. This, ostensibly, was the reason that the photo had been sent me, my mother having some notion that I would be interested in the new acquisition; I'd kept it because it was the only picture I had of her, kept it tucked inside a Webster's dictionary (under M for Mother) on my desk. But one night I rose from my bed, suddenly consumed with fear that Bunny would find it while snooping around my room. No hiding place seemed safe enough. Finally I burned it in an ashtray.

They were unpleasant enough, these private inquisitions, but I cannot find words to adequately express the torments I suffered when he chose to ply this art of his in public. Bunny's dead now, requiescat in pace, but so long as I live I will never forget a particular interlude of sadism to which he subjected me at the twins' apartment.

A few days earlier, Bunny had been grilling me about where I'd gone to prep school. I don't know why I couldn't just have admitted the truth, that I'd gone to the public school in Plano. Francis had gone to any number of wildly exclusive schools in England and Switzerland, and Henry had been at correspondingly exclusive American ones before he dropped out entirely in the eleventh grade; but the twins had only gone to a little country day school in Roanoke, and even Bunny's own hallowed Saint Jerome's was really only an expensive remedial school, the sort of place you see advertised in the back of Town and Country as offering specialized attention for the academic underachiever. My own school was not particularly shameful in this context, yet I evaded the question long as I could till finally, cornered and desperate, I had told him I'd gone to Renfrew Hall, which is a tennis-y, indifferent sort of boys' school near San Francisco. That had seemed to satisfy him, but then, to my immense discomfort, and in front of everybody, he brought it up again.

"So you were at Renfrew," he said chummily, turning to me and popping a handful of pistachios in his mouth.

"Yes."

"When'd ya graduate?"

I offered the date of my real high school graduation.

"Ah," he said, chomping busily on his nuts. "So you were there with Von Raumer."

"What?"

"Alec. Alec Von Raumer. From San Fran. Friend of Cloke's. He was in the room the other day and we got talking. Lots of old Renfrew boys at Hampden, he says."

I said nothing, hoping he'd leave it at that.

"So you know Alec and all."

"Uh, slightly," I said.

"Funny, he said he didn't remember you," said Bunny, reaching over for another handful of pistachios without taking his eyes off me. "Not at all."

"It's a big school."

He cleared his throat. "Think so?"

"Yes."

"Von Raumer said it was tiny. Only about two hundred people." He paused and threw another handful of pistachios into his mouth, and chewed as he talked. "What dormitory did you say you were in?"

"You wouldn't know it."

"Von Raumer told me to make a point of asking you."

"What difference does it make?"

"Oh, it's nothing, nothing at all, old horse," said Bunny pleasantly. "Just that it's pretty damn peculiar, n'est-ce pas? You and Alec being there together for four years, in a tiny place like Renfrew, and he never laid eyes on you even once?"

"I was only there for two years."

"How come you're not in the yearbook?"

"I am in the yearbook."

"No you're not."

The twins looked stricken. Henry had his back turned, pretending not to listen. Now he said, quite suddenly and without turning around: "How do you know if he was in the yearbook or not?"

"I don't think I've ever been in a yearbook in my life," said Francis nervously. "I can't stand to have my picture taken. Whenever I try to-"

Bunny paid no attention. He leaned back in his chair.