American 10-year-old Elizabeth and her parents come to live in a small cottage in the west of England so her dad can do research in Hardy Country. Elizabeth is unsettled by it all. One day on a walk through the nearby wild woods she and her mother come across a pair of ancient derelict cottages. When Elizabeth returns there on her  own later she discovers that, far from derelict, the cottages are athrob with life; further, the forest around them is far thicker than she remembers it being before . . .

She eventually discovers that she has timeslipped back to 1871. There is a 10-year-old living in one of the cottages, Ann, and Ann alone of all her family knows that Elizabeth is there watching. When Elizabeth impulsively touches Ann, her identity flows into the other girl, and she is able to spend some time as a not-entirely-passive observer of Ann's life before running back through the wild woods and into the present. Needless to say, when she gets home she finds she hasn't been gone long.

Several times more Elizabeth journeys into the past to spend extended periods living within Ann's life. Finally, though, Ann's baby brother dies and Ann herself falls ill -- and, it seems certain, will soon join him. She chooses as a better option than this to come into the present and let her selfness flow into Elizabeth, the way Elizabeth's has so often flowed into her. For the rest of Elizabeth's life Ann will be, as it were, at the back of her mind.

This is an extraordinarily charming tale, and in both telling and subtlety of concept an advance on Anderson's earlier In the Keep of Time. I do hope some wise publisher somewhere has the sense soon to bring it back into print; at the moment used copies are commanding moderately high prices on Amazon. (I was able to obtain my reading copy solely through New Jersey's inter-library loan system, shortly to be axed at the behest of NJ Governor Chris Christie, who's cutting the state's library budget by a completely insane 74%.) ( )