Even very great things, he meant, can’t last forever. Or beautiful things, I suppose. Those too. Things that don’t really need replacing except because they fall apart.

Everything is connected,′ stated Rachel. ‘Patterns everywhere.

The bowler shakes his head in disgust at the run conceded and glares at Zach on the way back to his mark, a menace Zach shrugs off with a half smile, though Rachel can feel his hackles rising. Her own rise, too, in symbiosis.

Platov said that the burning of Moscow has changed the world forever, it has changed Russians forever, landowner and serf, officer and peasant, all souls, nobody will ever think the same again, and Aleksei tried to fathom it, irreversible change, but it was raining in his head, as that Prussian fellow at the next table kept moaning.

Go home, Rachel. She so likes to to be there for his return. Zachariah is coming, Zachariah is coming! Rachel is all gravity now, nudged from dreams, a swift transition. Rachel dreams much and often. She is not hunted.

Hopes are so well constructed, so monstrously dashed!

The Life of Samuel Alexander, His Strange Surprizing Adventures, starts out like a song.

Look what I have done! she thought. Let me not have killed him.

I know so little, she tells herself again, searching her mother's face. In the end, we know so little.

In Aleksei's fanciful dream of two Katherines by Caucasian blue waters, his sister and his English love, there is a child also, a fairy-tale girl, he fancies, with flyaway hair at the nape. She chirps gaily as a bird and is rosier than a red rose and whiter than white snow.