T hree girls moved across the billiard-table lawn of a great manor house, 
circling and swarming about a common center of gravity like gamboling sparrows. 
Sometimes they
would stop, turn inward to face one another, and engage in animated discussion. 
Then they would suddenly take off running, seemingly free from the constraints 
of inertia, like petals struck by a gust of spring wind. They wore long heavy 
wool coats over their dresses to protect them from the cool damp air of New 
Chusan's high central plateau. They seemed to be making their way toward an 
expanse of broken ground some half-mile distant, separated from the great 
house's formal gardens by a gray stone wall splashed with bits of lime green 
and lavender where moss and lichen had taken hold. The terrain beyond the wall 
was a muted hazel color, like a bolt of Harris tweed that has tumbled from the 
back of a wagon and come undone, though the incipient blooming of the heather 
had flung a pale violet mist across it, nearly transparent but startlingly 
vivid in those places where the observer's line of sight grazed the natural 
slope of the terrain—if the word natural could properly be 
applied to any feature of this island. Otherwise as light and free as birds, 
the girls were each weighed down by a small burden that seemed incongruous in 
the present setting, for the efforts of the adults to persuade them to leave 
their books behind had, as ever, been unavailing.