I suppose that even then -- or rather, especially then, when our compact is so new, so unproved, its threads still slender and weak -- I suppose that even then I might draw back, unloose myself from the tugging of his ambition. I believe I wake thinking I will; for the room -- the room in which, in whispers, at the hush of midnight, he took my hand, unfolded his dangerous plan, like a man putting back the rustling wrappers about a poison -- the room reassembles itself in the chill half-hour of dawn into all its rigid familiar lines. I lie and watch it. I know every curve and angle. I know them, too well. I remember weeping, as a girl of eleven, at the strangeness of Briar -- at the silence, the stillness, the turning passages and cluttered walls. I supposed then that those things would be strange to me for ever, I felt their strangeness make me strange -- make me a thing of points and hooks, a burr, a splinter in the gullet of the house. But Briar crept on me. Briar absorbed me. Now I feel the simple weight of the woollen cloak with which I have covered myself and think, I shall never escape! I am not meant to escape! Briar will never let me!

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