“Safe?” Her voice was small, timid and delicate. But beautiful. The one word chimed like little bells. Her first word spoken to me.”

“Her smile and voice suggested the kind of excitement that comes when the first words in a long, silent relationship are spoken at last - a subtle excitement secretly incorporating into this one moment everything that has happened until now.”

“Kim lifted the lid. Inside, on a small pillow covered in white velvet, lay a gold sunburst the size of her thunbnail, hung on a delicate chain. It looked a little like the first spell she had ever cast, a small explosion of light re-created in metal, and she was not really surprised to find the card with the single word "Mairelon" scrawled across it.”

“Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing, and a little breeze touched her hair and stirred the leaves overhead. All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others farther off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others. In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed good-bye, the bells would be chiming, too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring the leaves in the Botanic Garden...”

“And I'm moved, it's so beautiful. Not what I wrote, but to have it given back like this. To have her remember the words and the tune. To hear it in her voice.”

“She hears the word bell, or orchard, or swallow, and she experiences a strange surprise, like the feel of a coin in the soil. These words make her wistful; they overwhelm her with longing. Not for her orchard, nor the bell in her church, nor the swallows that nest in the eaves of her house. For something else altogether, something she would have forgotten completely. She wonders: Why should these words pierce me, if they are not the remains of a currency I once knew how to spend?”