"Gaily bedight, a gallant knight, in sunshine and in shadow," Katharine chanted under her breath, jumping the hopscotch grid in the recreation area in time to the enigmatic words. "Had journeyed long, singing a song, in search of Eldorado."

The reminder had been proclaimed about three hours before, right in the middle of morning instruction. As before, its strangeness and unpredictability had caused Katharine's classmates great distress; as before, its strangeness and beauty had filled Katharine herself with a feeling of intense, almost painful approval and welcome. And, as before, the contrast between her reaction and those of her friends had made her feel quite unhappy – even a little guilty, though she felt sure she wasn't really in the wrong.

But, this time, she had also noticed something special about how the words of the reminder were related to one another. Somehow, she hadn't hitherto noticed how both of the first two reminders liked to put words together that ended with the same sound: glance and dance, trees and breeze, sea and flee and be, and so on. It was only with this third reminder, and its emphatic repetition of two mysterious words that both ended in -addo, that her attention had fixed on this detail – with a little shiver of nervous apprehension, as this felt somehow like an improper thing to dwell upon. It was like when Ophelia had been disciplined, back when they were Twos, for drawing too much attention to Katharine's pale eyes: it wasn't polite, their Instructor had explained, to treat accidental differences as though they were important. And wasn't the common ending of thought and brought an accidental difference between them and other words?

But the fascination of the discovery had been too much for her; despite her conscience's misgivings, her mind had descended upon the reminder with a sort of hungry urgency, to see what other secrets might lie hidden in the mere pattern of its words. Shadow and Eldorado, yes – and then there were other, similar pairs of words nestled between them, bedight and knight (whatever they meant), and long and song, and all the others.

"But he grew old, this knight so bold, and o'er his heart a shadow!" (The loose pebbles on the pavement trembled faintly under the eager blows of Katharine's feet.) "Fell as he found no trace of ground that looked like Eldorado!"

And it wasn't just the sounds of the words that were the same, either. One could divide up the reminder into groups of words that ended with the matching ones, and those groups would always be the same length – of syllables, at least, if not always of words or letters. (And it made sense, she thought, that syllables would be the important kind of length to the reminder, since they were the length of a word's sound. Sound was obviously very important to the reminder; maybe it was the only thing about words that could make them beautiful – or the simplest one, at least.) The groups that ended with shadow and Eldorado had seven syllables each, and all the others had four – and there was always a pair of four-syllable groups just before one of the seven-syllable ones. It was all very careful and orderly – like the human body in her schoolbooks, only beautiful instead of alive. (She couldn't help wondering, with a nervous little giggle, whether the two things were related somehow.)

And there was a rhythm to it all, too. It wasn't as regular as the rest of it, for some reason, but the idea of it could still be clearly heard, if one listened: da-dum-da-dum, da-dum-da-dum, da-dum-da-dum-da-da-da… It wasn't quite like any other rhythm Katharine had ever heard, but there was something about it that excited her – or perhaps it wasn't excitement, exactly, but she felt herself wanting to move and jump in time with it. Hence, her present activity.

"And as his strength failed him at length, he met a pilgrimshadow!" It was lucky, she thought, that the ten squares of the hopscotch grid were arranged so as to form eight rows – exactly one more than the number of beats in each half-stanza of the reminder. If they hadn't been, sooner or later she would have had to pause for breath before she reached an -addo, which would have been ugly of her. (She actually used the word ugly in her mind – and, notably, didn't stop to wonder how she knew it to be the antonym for beautiful.) "'Shadow,' cried he, 'where can it be, this land of Eldorado?'"

The final trochee brought her back to square 1 for the third time – but instead of taking a deep breath, twirling back around, and beginning again with the next stanza, she dropped her right foot to the ground, spread her arms, and raised her face toward the sky. She couldn't have said why, exactly; there was just something about the very end of the reminder – the way the sing-song quality suddenly failed, and the strange words acquired a flavor as of something huge and ominously wondrous – that made that posture, and the ever-so-slightly raised voice with which she spoke the lines, seem only proper.

"'Over the Mountains of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,' the shade replied,
'If ye seek for…'"

"Katharine?"

Katharine jumped, and the last word dissolved into a faint, squeaking yelp. She turned and saw Ophelia standing behind her, and her cheeks flushed hot with discomfort at the thought of what her classmate might have overheard; ever since their altercation over the first reminder, relations between the two Sevens had been rather strained, and Katharine didn't want to have made things worse.

"Oh, um… hello, Ophelia," she said. "Did you want the grid? It's fine, I'm done with it…"

Ophelia just shook her head; she seemed quite uncharacteristically unsure of herself, and just shuffled her feet for a moment in silence, her eyes drifting idly in the direction her friend had indicated. "What happened to your marker?" she said, staring at the ten empty squares.

"I didn't use one," said Katharine.

"You should have," said Ophelia vaguely. "It's better than way. More challenging."

Katharine shrugged. "Next time I will, I guess," she said. "So what was it that you wanted?"

Ophelia took a deep breath, and toyed with a stray lock of her hair. "Well, it's just… I was wondering if… I mean…" She made a face, cleared her throat, and started again. "You remember a few weeks ago, when I got angry at you for using a word you couldn't explain? I apologize for that, by the way," she added. "I've been thinking about it, and probably it wasn't fair of me."

"Yes, I remember," said Katharine. "What about it?"

Then she saw Ophelia's eyes narrow in annoyance, and realized what she'd overlooked. "And I accept your apology, too," she added hastily.

Ophelia relaxed, and nodded. "Well, I just had… an idea, I guess," she said. "When you call something whatever-full… how does the word go again?"

"Beautiful," said Katharine.

"Beautiful," Ophelia repeated slowly. The word sounded uncomfortable on her lips, but there was something about the resolution with which she brought it out that Katharine found herself rather admiring. "All right, then. Is that the kind of thing it would be when the number 5 comes out just right in a math answer?"

Katharine stared at her. "What?"

"Its shape, I mean," said Ophelia. "It was when we were doing our arithmetic, just before recreation." (She was speaking quickly now, as though she were suddenly eager, having managed to begin her revelation, to have all of it heard and understood.) "You know how 5's are so hard to write – or maybe you don't, since your handwriting is so much bigger, but usually when I try them I can never get the one hooked corner right, so they end up just looking like weird S's. But it wasn't that way today. I don't know why – maybe it was because I was concentrating so hard on the paper – but when I was double-checking it after I'd finished, I realized that there wasn't anything on the sheet but 5's – real, proper 5's," she emphasized, beaming with sublime satisfaction as she spoke.

"Oh," said Katharine. "Well… that's good, I guess."

"And all the other digits were the same way," said Ophelia. "The 8's weren't too skinny or loopy, the 4's had exactly the right amount of triangle in them – it was just a whole sheet of figures that all looked exactly the way they should look. I mean, they looked more like the numbers they were than I'd ever been able to make them do before. It was just so perfect and… well, when I saw it, I just thought of you and that word. It felt right, somehow, to say that that was… beautiful."

She hesitated, then, and started fidgeting with her hair again. "But that didn't make sense to me, when I thought about it," she said. "Getting the shapes of numbers right isn't anything to do with… with the thing you called beautiful. It's just quiet and sensible – the kind of thing Instructors and Elders would want to happen, not like the… other thing. So I wanted to ask you: does it really work that way? I mean, can beautiful really mean both those things?"

Katharine frowned, and thought about it. A host of golden daffodils; white birds on the foam of the sea; a land beyond the Mountains of the Moon… and a schoolwork sheet full of neatly handwritten figures. It didn't feel like the same thing to her, at all – but she wasn't sure how much that meant, really. If beauty was as important as she thought it was, it probably came in all sorts of shapes and sizes – as many as there were people, maybe, or even more. So she couldn't expect to recognize all beauty just by her own instincts; there had to be some kinds that she would have to learn to see, and maybe Ophelia had found one of those. That would be nice, if she had – not just for her, but for everyone.

"I guess it could be," she said. "I'm pretty sure beautiful is something everything's supposed to be – and 5's are things, aren't they? So there must be some way for them to be it."

It seemed a poor reply to her, but Ophelia nodded thoughtfully as though she had said something profound. "So what should I do, then?" she said. "Should I save the paper when I get it back tomorrow? It seems as though beautiful things shouldn't just be thrown away – but what about the problems I got wrong? With the Instructor's marks on them, they probably won't be so beautiful anymore; will it still be worth it?"

"I don't know," said Katharine plaintively. "You're asking all these hard questions, Ophelia, and I just don't have the answers. I'm just a Seven like you, not somebody wise."

Ophelia giggled. "All right, that's fair," she said. "I guess we'll have to find the answers together, then."

This made Katharine relax, and smile. "Yes," she said. "I guess we will."

"I wonder why none of the adults seem to know," said Ophelia meditatively. "That day when you first mentioned the word, I asked about it at sharing-of-feelings, and none of my family members had ever heard it before – not even Mother, and she's an Instructor of Elevens. And when we looked it up in the dictionary, it wasn't there, either."

"Maybe it's too old," Katharine suggested. "My father says there were a lot of old words that got taken out of the dictionary when he was a child, because nobody was using them and their definitions didn't make sense to anybody; maybe beautiful was one of those."

Ophelia wrinkled her nose. "Well, that'd be frustrating," she said. "Even if the definition didn't make sense, I'd still like to know it. It's so uncomfortable, having a word in your head when you don't have any idea what it means."

"Maybe…" Katharine began, then stopped.

Ophelia looked inquiringly at her. "What?"

Katharine shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "I was just thinking, maybe it means what you said about the 5's – how they were so much more like what they should be. Maybe beautiful means that the thing is what it ought to be – more like the idea of itself… I don't know."

Ophelia stared at her. "The idea?" she said. "Whose idea?"

As Katharine shrugged helplessly, the bell rang for the end of recreation, and the two Sevens cut their speculations short and headed back inside. Katharine, as they went, felt a pang of regret that she hadn't been more help to her friend – but what else, she thought, could she have done? As she had said, she was only a Seven; if people were going to come up and ask her to explain beauty to them, there was only so much she would be able to do for them. (But that, of course, didn't lessen her regret any.)

Perhaps she would have been reassured if she could have seen into Ophelia's mind at that moment, and observed how the seeds she had so diffidently sown were already beginning to bear fruit. But that sort of knowledge isn't given to Sevens – or to Elders, for that matter.