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the image of the dead girl, Laura, gazing down on me. It was thinking about the boy whose existence had briefly collided with mine. Had he mended the glass in some mysterious way? No, that was absurd, ridiculous.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about him, though. Who was he? Where had he come from? As I tried to fall asleep, I remembered his intense gaze, his smile, the shadows under his eyes…. I remembered the gentle touch of his hand as it brushed my face and the coolness of his breath on my skin. However much I tried to drive him from my thoughts, I seemed to hear his voice in my head, laughing. We’ll meet again…again…again….
    Eventually I found sleep, but not rest. I dreamed lurid, fevered dreams, until one last dream came in which the terrible gray sea rose over the moors and smashed Wyldcliffe into oblivion with one mighty wave.
    I awoke and bolted up, panting and sweating. For a second I struggled to remember where I was. Of course. The school. The dorm. The four other girls lying asleep so near me. I pushed back the white drape to try to get more air, then had to stop myself from crying aloud. Out of the corner of my eye I had seen a girl with long red hair and a pale, frightened face. I whipped around to look at her, then sank back, trembling. How stupid of me. It had only been my own unearthly reflection in a long mirror that was fixed to the opposite wall. I clamped my eyes shut, but there was no way I could get back to sleep.
    The feeling crept over me, like rising fog, that I was being watched. There was someone else in the room apart from the five of us; I was sure of it. I strained to listen. There was the softest echo of someone singing a lullaby, as though long-ago and faraway. I heard light footsteps, a cough, and the pages of a book being turned. Someone was there, hidden by the deep shadows.
    Another impossibility. I tried to shrug it off. I was just nervous, unsettled about being in a strange place. It was probably someone in the next dorm or on the floor below. Sounds got distorted in a big old house like this; that was all.
    That first night I didn’t know any better than to blame it on my imagination. On that first night I didn’t know who was watching over me. I didn’t know that her life was tangled with mine: my guardian, my sister, my other self. I couldn’t guess that I would get to know her, discover her secrets, and even read the pages of her private journal.
    I lay awake all night long, until the pale sun emerged like a ghost from the grave.

Four
    THE JOURNAL OF LADY AGNES, SEPTEMBER
    13, 1882 My news is that dearest S. is back from his travels at last, after months of wandering abroad with his tutor, Mr. Philips. We did not expect to see him again until Christmas, but he arrived at the Hall last night and came here in his father’s carriage early this morning. This has been a wonderful surprise in our humdrum routine. I feel as though life has taken me by the shoulders and given me a thorough shaking and that now I am ready for any challenge.
    It was so good to see my childhood friend again! At first, though, I was a little shy. He has grown remarkably tall and handsome, and made me feel quite babyish with his tales of Paris and Constantinople and Vienna — I who have scarcely been out of Wyldcliffe’s lonely valley. But very soon we were chattering like magpies. He still has the same eager air, the same desire to share everything with me, the same intense blue gaze. Although our mothers are only very distantly related by marriage, he is closer to me than any cousin could be; truly the brother I never had.
    He looked tired, however, underneath his smiles. I was not surprised to hear that he had suffered a fever in Morocco and had been dreadfully ill for many days. Now he is troubled by a wearisome cough and is thinner than he should be, with dark shadows under his eyes. His illness is the reason for his return home earlier than planned.
    I cannot stop myself from being selfishly