*

…But first the directions… Wen decided to ignore them completely and find the stone by way of Mr Pre-Science-Man which proved to be spectacularly successful only, of course, she did not tell me that this was her plan and just sort of left me in the middle of the wood with the now very grubby looking directions in my hand and no stone in view…

One minute she was behind me conversing in ‘direction-speak’, the next she was not, and was, instead, along with the stone, if it did indeed exist, nowhere to be seen…

*

…She was gone a long time too… long enough, for a prolonged search of the immediate area… and a prolonged retracing of our track… and a prolonged foray back to both the first… and then the second streams, all to have proven fruitless…

And long enough for me to have finally settled down on a tree stump by the path and started contemplating just how to explain the loss of one director of our school… to the other director of our school…

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