Thank you to all of you reading and/or reviewing. I know I've been gone a while. This was another one of those chapters that stoically resisted being written. Hopefully the rest are more cooperative, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy what there is of this one!

'I thought you were putting all this lot in order?' said Poppy, coming into the sitting room. Nan, Di and Mara were gathered around the scrubbed pine table efforts divided between attempting to sort through letters pertaining life after Redmond and attending to coursework. They were partly hindered by Pilgrim, who in a sociable frame of mind had gone to sleep across Mara's left arm and the whole hind right corner of the table.

'We are,' said Di, not looking up from the letter she was penning.

'And this is order how?' asked Poppy, coming and hovering over Nan's shoulder.

'Just because you wouldn't call it –'

'Catkin, no one would call this even half organised,' said Poppy and began to laugh. Carefully she reached into the maze of paper and began shuffling. 'Nan, Nan, Di, Nan again, Mara, Di, another for Nan, Di, Di again, Mara, Nan…Catkin, why do you have treble the amount of paperwork compared to the others?'

'Probably because she's been writing compulsively to people since at least October,' said Mara before disappearing back into Electra.

'Late October,' said Nan. She began shuffling through her stack of letters, deftly and succinctly undoing Poppy's work. 'I wanted to make sure I had somewhere to go afterwards,' she said. 'It's not that I don't want to go back to Ingleside so much as I've got used to living in my own house. You know, eating meals in my own time, sitting up late into the night and not fretting about the light keeping anyone awake…organising the kitchen –'

'Oh yes,' said Poppy dryly, 'because you and I have extensive control of the kitchen.'

Nan shrugged, unapologetic. 'You know what I mean.' They did. Poppy began to restack the letters, pausing over one in larger-than-usual size and thickness.

'Forgive me being nosey,' she said to Nan, 'but why is Redmond writing to you?'

'Oh that,' said Nan. 'That's my Indian Pipe dream. I wrote to them applying for an MLitt course. I suppose that will be their answer. It all depends of course on whether… '

She was cut off by so many excited exclamations.

'You did what?'

'You never said!'

'What did they say?!'

'When were you going to mention it?'

Nan fended all of these off by flapping her hands in frantic gesture of communication. This proving ineffective she seized the letter and leveraged it as a flag, perhaps a standard. 'It depends on funding,' she said when they had quieted, much as if they had never interrupted. 'And whether I can get it, because Rilla's share of the education money ought to be…well for Rilla. And I wanted to do this myself. A whole other year of studying seems extravagant in the extreme, under the circumstances. The whole dream belongs to a world without a war.'

The others nodded understanding. Then impulsively from Mara, 'But you'd go? If you got the funding?' She looked as if someone had lighted her up with a candle.

'In an utopian daydream? I'd go in a minute. But now…'Nan shrugged, a gesture of great eloquence, Poppy thought. 'I still haven't made up my mind,' she said. This occasioned another onslaught of excitability and incredulity from all sides of the scrubbed pine table.

'Of course you'll go!'

'You must!'

'Catkin it's ideal for you.'

'I know, I know,' said Nan, laughing at their enthusiasm. 'No one wants this more than I do. But if I stay –stay here –it's another year I'm not saving towards a life with Jerry. After the war, I mean. And I know that might be another four years from now –but it might be tomorrow . And if it is sooner rather than later…'Nan shrugged, helpless to say more. And yet Poppy thought, still articulating that much more than the rest of them could have hoped to achieve under the circumstances.

'I don't want to wait another four years after that to be married. I mean, it can be done –mums did it –but I've read the letters she wrote dad all through those years, and his answers…I've done so many hard things already. I don't want to endure one more.'

'Of course you don't,' said Poppy, reaching for Nan's hand and squeezing it.

'You shouldn't have to,' said Mara.

Nan pulled her stack of letters towards her and began reshuffling it. 'I expect I'll have to wait anyway,' she said, extracting a more innocuous letter from the pile. 'I don't want to prolong it unduly. I think that's all I mean.' She broke the seal and said almost casually as she extracted the letter in question though, 'but you're definitely staying, aren't you, and Ariel?'

'Are you?' said Poppy to Mara, surprised.

'Well it's being talked about, anyway,' said Mara to the depths the Sophocles, translation by a name Poppy couldn't read upsidedown. How cavalier they all were about the future! Poppy couldn't begin to imagine what hers was going to look like, except for a great gaping hole that was the absence of the other girls who pinned hopes. It hurt horribly. She ought to be pursuing the means and motives for Mara staying on in Kingsport, but since that too hurt to much she said instead, 'It was Shakespeare that first said all that nonsense about partings being sweet sorrow, wasn't it?'

'Mm,' said Mara, still to Electra. 'Why?'

'I was just wondering if he'd ever actually taken leave of anyone, that's all.'

'Oh,' said Mara. She folded her arms across her book, and offered Poppy a smile.

'We have months,' she said. 'Don't fret, Mouse. If we must have lasts they may as well be enjoyable ones.'

'Of course,' said Di. 'Besides, you never thought we'd let you drop out of our world so easily?'

Poppy had no idea. She was still having trouble envisaging the afterward. Would the war be over, or only almost over? Or would it go on another four years? It all seemed very complicated. Across from her Mara murmured, 'Good God, would it be more or less gruesome in the original, do you think,' and closed her book with resolution. Di appeared to be reading two letters at once, her forehead creased either in thoughtfulness or indecision. Poppy couldn't decide. She was more than willing to be pulled into one of Nan's absent-minded hugs as that young woman swapped letter writing for one of her economies. Nan was into the story's heart before it dawned on Poppy that this wasn't a proper economy, the usual from, If I could wish for anything in the world…not having been observed. The world was teetering on a precipice, and in the process Nan's economies had turned into stories outright. What else, Poppy wondered as she listened, had changed?

In February, a cold but dry month, their number was augmented by Poppy's sister making good on a long-standing threat to visit.

'Mum's idea,' said Poppy to the others when she relayed the news. 'Jo's making noises about wanting to start at Redmond in the autumn and she wanted her to see it before making up her mind. I don't know why, considering I'd never seen Kingsport prior to that day we all met in the front garden.'

Jo –proper name Jocasta –arrived on the Swallowgate doorstep bearing the news of Jerricho's capture by the British and brimming with warmth and affection not only for Poppy, but all the girls who pinned hopes.

'Poppy's letters are full of you,' she said, 'I feel as if we met months ago.'

She had barely crossed the threshold before her given name was found too unwieldy and to the relief of all concerned, was dropped for Poppy's more manageable and sisterly nicknname. Smaller than Poppy, Jo had the same crop of dark hair ('You've cut it,' said Poppy on their reunion) but her eyes were blue and catlike to Poppy's grey owlish ones. They would have known her anywhere though for Poppy's sister; they had the same way of seeing all the good in the world and bringing it into focus. They loved her at once because she was Poppy's, but the sentiment seemed to be that they would have loved her anyway; it was impossible not to.

'It was her fault,' Poppy said later, once Jo had arrived 'that I was conscripted for Hero,' this to Mara, the others having always supposed Poppy's exposure to the dramatic begun and ended with her aiding Mara in the learning of her scripts.

'Only because no one else had the memory for so many lines,' said Jo. For this sisterly betrayal Poppy threw a pillow at her, not ungently, and they all laughed.

'I hadn't realised she was one of mine,' Mara said, 'you neglected to tell me, Mouse,' and the laughter increased.

It was a good month to visit; the term was in full throttle, Kingsport bursting with students.

'Even if, as Mara observed to Jo as they returned from a tour of the library, 'It looks like the scene from The Convent of Pleasure that Cavendish forgot to write.'

'Or Princess Ida, which I suppose comes to the same thing. But it won't always have been like this?'

'No,' said Mara, 'Definitely not.'

Poppy was in class for the afternoon, a slave to something by the dreadful name of convex geometry, and in her absence the rest of the girls had taken it upon themselves to entertain Jo, a protocol so reassuringly normal that it was almost possible to forget the war. The weather continuing mild they went on long walks through the wood, where the snowdrops were blossoming, lingering by the frozen turtle pond at its midpoint to feed the returning red-winged blackbirds. The cardinals of course had never gone away, taking the swallows' place among the eaves back at Swallowgate. They showed off the Martello tower, the pond, the gazebo, and the old house on Spottiswood road, skirting only the St. John's graveyard because in the midst of war, at the muddy tail end to winter it struck all concerned as a demoralising haunt. 'Though of course,' said Nan, guiltily attempting to salvage some of its old glory, 'Mums loved it for walking in.'

They traversed the centre of town, pointing out here the lecture theatres, there the examination hall. They wandered down the wynds pointing out the best shops for haberdashery, gloves, ready-made clothes ('From a different world, of course,' said Di), the fishmonger who knew them by name ('You want,' advised Nan, 'to invoke Mara, if you mention us at all. They like her because she knows fish.'), the butcher from whom you could get a week's worth of meat at a discount ('Well,' said Poppy to be exact, 'five days' worth. And that may be symptomatic of the war. It's not exactly an extravagance of meat when you get it.).

Somehow the demands of the term fell out such that it was Poppy that pointed out the convocation hall and said of it, 'That's where they hold the graduations, but it's also where they stage the student productions,' and Mara who took her through the hushed halls of the library, the air thick with its smell of old book and dust. Mustiness, Poppy might have described it, but it was more than that. The sun filtered through the high stained glass windows of the building and splashed in dappled colour across the shelves adding a sacrosanct quality to the air. It was dazzling, not to say startling, to come out into the sun afterwards where people rushed pell-mell across roads and carts and horses rattled along the street as though life itself depended on it.

'You've come at completely the wrong time, of course,' said Poppy affectionately over dinner towards the end of Jo's stay. 'You'll miss seeing Arden. You ought to have come in the spring.'

'Oh,' said Nan, 'is that what the play is this year? As You Like it?'

''Fancy a guess who they've made Rosalind?' said Poppy, laughingly.

Jo said, 'Oh I don't know, I may come back for your graduation. Would I catch it then?'

'Very likely,' said Mara.

'You haven't got to do that,' said Poppy, meaning the graduation.

'Well someone should,' Jo said, 'and I want to. I like it here.'

'We haven't frightened you away then?' said Di, occasioning much laughter. Jo shook her head and waved a hand, surprising them with this sudden display of similarity to Poppy. They looked alike, but didn't generally act it.

'You'll be in good company anyway,' said Mara. 'Alastair's making noises about coming out here himself, if it proves possible.'

'He's reading maths, isn't he,' said Di, 'or planning on it?'

'That's right, the better to rebuild the harbour, he says. Though how that stems from so many equations…Mouse, we've got our siblings the wrong way round, don't you think?'

'Very definitely,' said Poppy. 'All they need is someone to come and read English. Are you sure your Spider can't be convinced Di, Nan?'

'Absolutely,' they said in a rare moment of unison, making the others laugh. 'Though I think,' said Di, 'that Ruthie's sister is considering English. Or philosophy. Both, if she can't make up her mind. She's certainly clever enough.'

There was more laughter. Poppy began to gather up the plates. Mara took over, neatly lifting the amassed plates from Poppy's hands and exhorting her to enjoy the remained of her sister's visit. Di went to put the kettle on, because 'We're not rationing hospitality.'

''However it turns out,' said Nan to Jo as they awaited the tea and the others, 'we'll wish you every good thing. A peaceable four years, a little ivied house, fellowship and adventures enough to balance the academic rigours and friendships to last.'

'Catkin,' said Poppy, 'that's almost a poem. We'd never have guessed.'

'A story maybe,' said Nan. Then she leaned back in her chair, picked up a neglected desert spoon and twisting it between her fingers, began one of her economies.

There was the inevitable leaden feeling of absence when Jo left, a hollowness in the chest that was exacerbated by the news of Germany's ongoing crusade against Eastern Europe. The girls leavened it as much as possible by sitting up late into the night on the first evening, recapitulating the visit to one another. By the time the sun came up they had fallen back into their old selves, pinning hopes, Walter would have said, and piecing lives. The sky grew purple with sunrise, and they stood at the windows watching it, their breath misting the glass, Nan, Di, Poppy and Mara. They were talking about coursework by then, the merits of Back of the North Wind, the motifs predominant in Galetea, lofty themes that only half held their attention. As the sun rose the girls who pinned hopes looked out at the horizon and scanned it as a collective for that one good thing that would lay the foundation of the futures they were building. The stars winked out but the moon lingered, a fingerling of new light not yet eclipsed, encircled by the ghost of its former self.

'Holding water, they call that,' said Mara, seeing it.

'New moon with the old, I was going to say,' Poppy said.

'Good or bad?' Di wanted to know.

'Good, I think,' said Mara, and they supposed that for the time being, that would have to be enough.

For anyone who didn't have obscure dramas rammed down their throat by high order of a Scottish university, The Convent of Pleasure is about a women's college that foreswears men. Sort of. In the way of Restoration comedy it's all a bit convoluted, but it ends, as I recall, in a marriage. As is observed, if you've seen the Gilbert and Sulivan Princess Ida, you know the plot. They just put music to it.