conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a plot for a book about Polly, People, Anaral entitled An Acceptable Time. End with the sentence '\nWhen they return Polly decides that she and Zachary shouldn't see each other any more.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: An Acceptable Time: Happy to be away from her large family for a while, Polly O'Keefe is spending the autumn with her maternal grandparents, dr Kate Murry and dr Alex Murry, getting a better education from them in science than she would have received at home.\nShe is grieving the loss of her beloved friend and mentor, Maximiliana Sebastiane Horne.\nSoon, however, surprising things start to happen, including the unexpected arrival of Zachary Gray, a charming but troubled college student whom Polly met in Greece and dated in Cyprus the year before (in A House Like a Lotus).\nThen, while walking near her grandparents' Connecticut home, Polly meets druids Karralys and Anaral and a warrior named Tav, all of whom lived in the area some three thousand years ago.\nShe soon learns that she is not the first person from her time to meet the Murrys' Pre-Columbian neighbors.\nBishop Nason Colubra, the brother of a family friend, dr Louise Colubra, has been investigating the hieroglyphs found on rocks in nearby, relics of Karralys' time.\nIn doing so, he has also come into repeated contact with Anaral's tribe, the People of the Wind (a tribe that previously appeared in A Swiftly Tilting Planet).\nThe retired bishop is initially reluctant to discuss this, having been met with his sister's skepticism in previous attempts.\nHowever, he feels responsible for exposing Polly to the potential dangers of a tesseract of intersecting periods of time.\nThe Murrys and the Colubras try to protect Polly from being drawn into the past, but although she tries to obey their restrictions on her movements, she continues to encounter Anaral and the others.\nKarralys and Tav formerly lived in ancient Britain, but have since crossed the ocean and made their home with the People of the Wind.\nOn Samhain, Polly feels a compulsion to visit the Murrys' indoor swimming pool, the modern location of a site considered sacred by Karralys, Anaral, and their tribe.\nPolly is suddenly transported to the past, where she learns that Tav wants to offer Polly in blood sacrifice in order to avert a drought.\nAlready the People Across the Lake are conducting raids due to the privations of drought, and Tav wants to protect his adopted people.\nKarralys sends Polly home.\nZachary, however, is intrigued when he learns that the odd people he has seen are from the ancient past.\nHis heart, previously seen as damaged by rheumatic fever in the Austin family novel The Moon by Night, is now so weak that he does not expect to live much longer.\nOn the slight possibility that the solution to his problem lies with the ancient druids, Zach rashly leads Polly back to the star-watching rock, a place where Polly found herself in the past once before.\nPolly and Zach are drawn through a time gate and trapped in ancient Connecticut, with neither the Murrys nor Louise Colubra there to help Polly out of a potentially fatal situation.\nTav soon changes his mind about whether his goddess wants Polly to be sacrificed.\nHer primary danger is not from the People of the Wind, but from their neighbors across the lake, where the drought is more severe.\nThe People Across the Lake conduct another raid, and leave behind two of their injured members as they withdraw.\nOne of them, Klep, is expected to be his tribe's future leader.\nHe develops an attachment to his healer, Anaral, and learns from Polly the concept of love.\nThe other injured man, Brown Earth, persuades Zachary to cross the lake with him during the night.\nTynak, the current leader of the People Across the Lake, promises to let the tribe's medicine man heal Zachary's heart if he helps bring Polly to them.\nZach agrees.\nHe participates in another raid, with Polly's capture as the goal.\nPolly tries to convince Zach that the People Across the Lake intend to sacrifice her for her blood, but he refuses to admit this.\nPolly escapes, but returns for Zachary's sake.\nUltimately, Polly's spirit of self-sacrifice and love, accompanied by the timely return of rain on her captors' side of the lake, wins out as a better way to interact with the Divine than an offering of death.\nThe two tribes agree to unite and help each other.\nZachary repents his betrayal of Polly, and his heart is physically healed (at least in part) before they return to their own time.\nWhen they return Polly decides that she and Zachary shouldn't see each other any more.