Gradually he grew calmer. He'd been defending his mother. They were frightening her; given the state she was in, they were persecuting her. He had a right to defend his home. His father would have wanted him to do that. He did it because it was the good thing to do. He did it to stop them from stealing the green leather case. He did it so he could find his father; and didn't he have a right to do that? All his childish games came back to him, with himself and his father rescuing each other from avalanches or fighting pirates. Well, now it was real. I'll find you, he said in his mind. Just help me and I'll find you, and we'll look after Mum, and everything'll be all right…

And after all, he had somewhere to hide now, somewhere so safe no one would ever find him. And the papers from the case (which he still hadn't had time to read) were safe too, under the mattress in Cittagazze.

Finally he noticed people moving more purposefully, and all in the same direction. They were leaving, because the attendant was telling them that the museum would close in ten minutes. Will gathered himself and left. He found his way to the High Street, where the lawyer's office was, and wondered about going to see him, despite what he'd said earlier. The man had sounded friendly enough…

But as he made up his mind to cross the street and go in, he stopped suddenly.

The tall man with the pale eyebrows was getting out of a car.

Will turned aside at once, casually, and looked in the window of the jeweler's shop beside him. He saw the man's reflection look around, settle the knot of his tie, and go into the lawyer's office. As soon as he'd gone in, Will moved away, his heart thudding again. There wasn't anywhere safe. He drifted toward the university library and waited for Lyra.

"Will," said Lyra.

She spoke quietly, but he was startled all the same. She was sitting on the bench beside him and he hadn't even noticed.

"Where did you come from?"

"I found my Scholar! She's called Dr. Malone. And she's got an engine that can see Dust, and she's going to make it talk—"

"I didn't see you coming."

"You weren't looking," she said. "You must've been thinking about something else. It's a good thing I found you. Look, it's easy to fool people. Watch."

Two police officers were strolling toward them, a man and a woman on the beat, in their white summer shirtsleeves, with their radios and their batons and their suspicious eyes. Before they reached the bench, Lyra was on her feet and speaking to them.

"Please, could you tell me where the museum is?" she said. "Me and my brother was supposed to meet our parents there and we got lost."

The policeman looked at Will, and Will, containing his anger, shrugged as if to say, "She's right, we're lost, isn't it silly." The man smiled. The woman said: "Which museum? The Ashmolean?"

"Yeah, that one," said Lyra, and pretended to listen carefully as the woman gave her instructions.

Will got up and said, "Thanks," and he and Lyra moved away together. They didn't look back, but the police had already lost interest.

"See?" she said. "If they were looking for you, I put 'em off. 'Cause they won't be looking for someone with a sister. I better stay with you from now on," she went on scoldingly once they'd gone around the corner. "You en't safe on your own."

He said nothing. His heart was thumping with rage. They walked along toward a round building with a great leaden dome, set in a square bounded by honey-colored stone college buildings and a church and wide-crowned trees above high garden walls. The afternoon sun drew the warmest tones out of it all, and the air felt rich with it, almost the color itself of heavy golden wine. All the leaves were still, and in this little square even the traffic noise was hushed.

She finally became aware of Will's feelings and said, "What's the matter?"

"If you speak to people, you just attract their attention," he said, with a shaking voice. "You should just keep quiet and still and they overlook you. I've been doing it all my life. I know how to do it. Your way, you just—you make yourself visible. You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't play at it. You're not being serious."

"You think so?" she said, and her anger flashed. "You think I don't know about lying and that? I'm the best liar there ever was. But I en't lying to you, and I never will, I swear it. You're in danger, and if I hadn't done that just then, you'd've been caught. Didn't you see 'em looking at you? 'Cause they were. You en't careful enough. If you want my opinion, it's you that en't serious."

"If I'm not serious, what am I doing hanging about waiting for you when I could be miles away? Or hiding out of sight, safe in that other city? I've got my own things to do, but I'm hanging about here so I can help you. Don't tell me I'm not serious."

"You had to come through," she said, furious. No one should speak to her like this. She was an aristocrat. She was Lyra. "You had to, else you'd never find out anything about your father. You done it for yourself, not for me."

They were quarreling passionately, but in subdued voices, because of the quiet in the square and the people who were wandering past nearby. When she said this, though, Will stopped altogether. He had to lean against the college wall beside him. The color had left his face.

"What do you know about my father?" he said very quietly.

She replied in the same tone. "I don't know anything. All I know is you're looking for him. That's all I asked about."

"Asked who?"

"The alethiometer, of course."

It took a moment for him to remember what she meant. And then he looked so angry and suspicious that she took it out of her rucksack and said, "All right, I'll show you."

And she sat down on the stone curb around the grass in the middle of the square and bent her head over the golden instrument and began to turn the hands, her fingers moving almost too quickly to see, and then pausing for several seconds while the slender needle whipped around the dial, flicking to a stop here and there, and then turning the hands to new positions just as quickly. Will looked around carefully, but there was no one near to see; a group of tourists looked up at the domed building, an ice-cream vendor wheeled his cart along the pavement, but their attention was elsewhere.

Lyra blinked and sighed, as if she were waking after a sleep.

"Your mother's ill," she said quietly. "But she's safe. There's this lady looking after her. And you took some letters and ran away. And there was a man, I think he was a thief, and you killed him. And you're looking for your father, and—"

"All right, shut up," said Will. "That's enough. You've got no right to look into my life like that. Don't ever do that again. That's just spying."

"I know when to stop asking," she said. "See, the alethiometer's like a person, almost. I sort of know when it's going to be cross or when there's things it doesn't want me to know. I kind of feel it. But when you come out of nowhere yesterday, I had to ask it who you were, or I might not have been safe. I had to. And it said…" She lowered her voice even more. "It said you was a murderer, and I thought, 'Good, that's all right, he's someone I can trust.' But I didn't ask more than that till just now, and if you don't want me to ask anymore, I promise I won't. This en't like a private peep show. If I done nothing but spy on people, it'd stop working. I know that as well as I know my own Oxford."

"You could have asked me instead of that thing. Did it say whether my father was alive or dead?"

"No, because I didn't ask."

They were both sitting by this time. Will put his head in his hands with weariness.