On Saturday began a long lisping April rain. Mr. Hibbs pointed out that anyhow the boys' half-holiday had been used up on the Friday forenoon, and although this happened because of disaster, in logic that made no difference: the spring and summer would be all too short if Ben and Reuben were to be ready for Harvard in September. Mr. Hibbs said too that man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble; in other words they'd better quit the commotion and go to work.

Mr. Kenny spent all of that day in Boston, returning late and weary in a twitching mood. It was one of the evenings, more frequent of late, when he insisted that no one but Ben or Reuben understood how to lift the boot off his gouty foot. Ben did that, as Kate stood by in tears, and from shadow at the side of the fireplace Reuben watched the old man with the bemused intentness of one who has only recently discovered that the study of human beings may begin at home. Reuben Cory had hardly spoken all day, except as the lessons required it of him....

When the boot was safely removed and the foot installed on a cushion, Ben ventured to ask whether any more had been learned concerning the death of Jan Dyckman. "Nor is like to be!" John Kenny snarled. "The law hath the brain of a gnat, meaning no dem'd disrespect to Mr. Derry, blast him! Cease crying, Kate! I'll not be in my grave for another ten or twenty years, and should you weep even then, dear, I'll rise to ha'nt you, I swear it—now there's a good girl." Since she could not check the flow, Kate bounced away to build a hot toddy, and later beckoned from the doorway for Ben to come and take it to him, lest her continued sniffling should offend.

Marsh had not been found; no sign of him, no hint of where he might have lodged. The waiter and bartender at the Lion Tavern professed total ignorance of such a man. "They'll be lying," said Reuben from his shadow, and John Kenny shifted his head in discomfort until he was in better posture to look at Reuben down his nose. "Lying, Reuben, or unobservant or forgetful. I incline somewhat to your view. It would seem that Mr. Derry, after one day of sniffing about like an old blind ferret with a cold in the nose, is prepared to write off the happening as an act of God."

When the toddy was consumed, and Mr. Kenny's clay pipe drawing properly, and the lashing mutter of rain at the windows had become no longer a nagging but a comfortable sound, Ben stirred the logs to stronger flame and said, stuttering only slightly: "Uncle John, is there any market for salt cod in New York?"

Long and drowsily, John Kenny contemplated a mild, large-eyed boy's face, high at the forehead, the jaw square but rounded at the chin, and the benediction upon it of firelight not unlike a lamp within. Toward such a lamp one might spread cold hands to warm them. "Mph! Might be."

Reuben smiled to himself and slipped out of the room, and so did not hear it when Ben inquired whether Mr. Shawn was to be considered in the room of Jan Dyckman. "Why, Ben—as a matter of fact I must give that some further thought," said John Kenny.

Later Ben said: "Uncle John, if Artemis should make a quick run, no further than New York and return, might I not—I mean, sir, I'd be gone only a few weeks, and could learn——"

"Now don't press me about that. I must give it more thought. Did we not go to Cambridge not long ago and discuss your situation with Mr. Leverett himself? Did he not examine you in beginner's Greek and in Latin, and find that even with the summer's work you may be scarce ready for the first year's studies?"

"But suppose, sir—Ru is ready, as Mr. Leverett said, and certainly he ought to begin in September—but suppose I were to wait another year? Then I might go with Artemis now—might I not?—and earn something, and continue studies afterward, in the winter, and next summer when Ru could aid me, and so...."

"Ben, you would sail as a ship's boy. If you endured the hardships, and satisfied Mr. Jenks in matters of heavy labor and obedience, the which is no easy thing to do, you might fairly soon achieve the proud condition of an ordinary seaman. They have a saying: 'Six days shalt thou labor as hard as thou art able; the seventh, holystone the main deck and chip the chain cable.' They say also: 'No law off soundings'—and I'm afraid that's true, though I guess the law according to Peter Jenks is just enough in its own harsh way. They have even another saying—I suppose it was repeated by the men who followed John Quelch a few years ago and were hanged with him at Copp's Hill: 'Better a short gasp on a tricing line than a long hunger, short pay and the bloody scurvy.'"

"But at least, Uncle John, there would not be the expense of my keep here, and I would be——"

"What? You're troubled that I should spend my substance on mine own—my—like a son—why, Ben, the old have little enough they can do except give. I pray you allow me to do that much."

"And I pray you, Uncle John, understand me! I did not mean it like that. I meant—if I sailed, I'd be learning things that might make me of some use to you in the business."

"Oh? So?... Well, you know that's near my heart. A few days ago you was undecided. We spoke of it, coming home from seeing Artemis return—did we not?"

"Yes, Uncle John."

"And I feared I was nursing an old man's vanity. Urging on you something that might be unwelcome.... Mind you, Ben, I am not your master and no one shall be. I will not say to you, go there, do this, as I might to the common sort. Somehow, of late years, I don't much fancy the meaning they give to the word 'gentleman' in England. Joseph Cory was a farmer, and a better gentleman than any milord in London. Yes, in this land the word doth seem to be earning a new definition, or maybe it did alway own it, but title-dazed Europe is in no posture to comprehend such a thing. You are a gentleman's son, Ben. I say there's an aristocracy which hath nothing at all to do with wealth or position, nor with ancestry neither except as a parent's good qualities do often appear in the children. I mean the aristocracy of the good mind with the good heart—you will not find that very often on earth, Benjamin. You are a gentleman, and no one may order you about, only guide a little, so far as love and friendship may do it, while you—while you are yet a boy."

Ben felt the fire in his cheeks, and dreaded stammering. "Well, sir, might it not be that sailing with Artemis would help me decide, or at least understand better, what I wish to do?"

"It—might.... Mind, I've not said yea or nay. Don't press me more on it now. It may be two weeks yet before Artemis is ready to go. Mr. Banning of Gloucester is delaying me. His dem'd price is too dear, noticed it a thousand times. Uh—don't you think so?"

If Reuben had been in the room he would have known how Ben, in the face of all common sense, was very nearly taking that to mean yes. He would have seen how the inner lamp steadied and brightened in a manner hardly reasonable when the overt topic was nothing more ecstatic than the current value of salt codfish. Why, the old man had not even said that Artemis would put out for New York instead of Barbados....

On Sunday the rain continued. Rob Grimes, an accomplished backslider with sixty-odd years of sin to his credit, marched off to meeting as usual and retained sanctity like a best suit until Monday morning, when Mr. Kenny's nervous gray gelding acted up at sight of the saddle and caused the first lapse into blasphemy. It was a conspiracy of the Powers against Rob, that everything should always go wrong on Monday morning, so that for the rest of the week his state of grace should be nothing but a God-damned ruin. Kate Dobson slipped away to the Anglican services that she found a comfort in a barbarous land. John Kenny fretted at home—even he might have been subject to arrest and fine for unnecessary travel on the Sabbath—fretted like one under enchantment who must spend a certain twenty-four hours of every week in the guise of a rabbit, a shrewd one who knows very well that if he should venture abroad where the godly are baying he'd be a gone bunny.

In their first year at Roxbury, Ben and Reuben had been similarly housebound on the Lord's day. But on a morning of urgent springtime in the year 1705, Reuben had advanced the doctrine that one could easily pass from the back door through the orchard and to the woods with no danger of detection, and look: anyone who did observe the sin would be far from any route to the meeting-house and therefore a sinner himself; wouldn't he? "Besides, sir," said Reuben Cory, "we've a'ready done it a couple-three times." "Oh," said John Kenny. "I find your reasoning faultless but incomplete. You omit, Mr. Cory, reference to the necessity of wearing your brown suits that don't show at a distance, and of promising to avoid the sky line and open places. Some say reason doth advance, even in these times. I a'n't sure. Wear your brown suits...."

On the Sunday after the death of Jan Dyckman, the rain was heavy enough to discourage even Reuben's need to wander. He felt it unsafe to go to Mr. Welland's cottage, for part of the approach out of the back fields was visible from the main street of Roxbury; and anyway Ben shamefacedly declared he needed help with the next half-acre of Cicero.

Drearily it rained on the Monday when Jan Dyckman was buried.

More time lost to lessons: Gideon Hibbs nourished that thought so obviously that there was no occasion for him to utter it aloud. He was not attending the funeral, having been only distantly acquainted with the Dyckman family. Acidly, with a kind of humor occasionally encountered at the borders of philosophy, he remarked to John Kenny that he was the fourth son in a family of twelve; all his brothers and sisters had married and begotten young, of whom the expected percentage had died, and thus he found himself already in possession of a massive collection of pallbearer's gloves, for the which he could discover no practical application whatsoever (although familiar with the rumor that some persons of a weightier worth than himself had turned a fair penny in disposing of such); he would therefore, with Mr. Kenny's permission, remain at home and take advantage of the peace and quiet to do a trifle more on a work which had engaged him now for ten years, namely an employment of the sternest logic—(it could not be published in the colonies)—in a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. Mr. Kenny sighed and patted his dusty back.

The few who were present with Mr. Kenny and the boys bulked like a multitude in the spotless parlor of the Dyckman house. More unobtrusive than the Jenks' slave Clarissa, Constable Derry was there—so far as was known, the corpse had not bled in anyone's presence. There were Jan's two small girls red-nosed in doll-like silence, his stricken wife, a handful of dour strangers, Captain Jenks thoroughly sober and looking like the vast man he was instead of a ruin, Faith and Charity stiff and amazingly pale in black, Clarissa self-effacing, and Madam Prudence Jenks with a black enameled comb instead of a red one.

The Lutheran dominie did not exhort, nor shout, nor whine, but spoke all manner of pleasant things concerning the nature of the dead man, and then entered on the main stream of his discourse—this a poetic enumeration and description of the mercies of God, announced with mild certainty as though he had been directly instructed in the matter and had been astonished at the kindness of the Lord in assenting to some of his own small suggestions. Unhesitatingly he implied that if any soul could rest sure of heaven it was the soul of Jan Dyckman. A gentle spirit, this minister: incapable of learning how to be content with discontent, he had luckily never needed to learn it, since not every son of Adam is obliged to go to school.

At some time during this passage of consolation a kerchief tumbled from Faith's restless hand. Ben was able to find and return it to her, not prevented, not even much scared by the polar stare of Captain Jenks. He won a pressure of her fingers and a sudden blue-eyed look of such depth and sweetness that she might have been saying aloud: "I am with you." Reuben sat motionless, all gold and ivory.

The minister's tender music did not touch on the fact of murder, yet somehow conveyed that this was an aspect of the infinite wisdom of God which at the present time it was not polite to mention.

The mellow voice was larger but otherwise not changed, when in the cemetery under a slanting curtain of rain it recited the last words of commitment to the earth. Here Ben and Reuben stood together and glanced often at each other—communication, as any observer would have known, but under this quiet rain perhaps only one message passed, the simplest and the most essential: I am with you.

It rained all night.

In the morning at Roxbury pools of standing water translated the image of a warmer sky, for it was now well past the time of the return of the robins, and of the bluebirds whose color of morning is a music made visible. Once in such a pool at the base of a rock near Uncle John's private road—but that was another April, the April of last year—a distant self of Ben Cory had been revived, so that the older boy could momentarily breathe with the breath of that child and rejoice in the sunlight wantoning over the child's bare chest and legs and muddy feet. He had been five then or younger, master of a vessel on a sea of shining calm—a chip with an oak-leaf sail, a pond in a world no longer living: well, in the immediate world you must write down a Latin subjunctive a hundred times, whipping an intractable brain into retaining it, and by the way, what the devil did Ovid himself care about subjunctives when it was spring in Italy? Nothing, Ru would say—subjunctive's one small step in a stairway to a place up yonder where you might get a glimpse of Ovid; and Ru would take the book from him, and tumble across the bed in his thin-legged sprawl or sit on the floor with his almost beardless chin hooked on his knees, and listen while Ben groped and stumbled through the lesson—correcting Ben casually, guiding, sometimes ripping out lewd or startling comment to make the Latin stick in Ben's mind by association, and never once needing to open the blasted volume and make sure he was right....

By the same pool in the April of 1707, this present year of change, Reuben Cory had stared as through a window on the inverted blue of heaven; had knelt by the rock to find white violets, the first to come, miniature, early-waking, with a midget purple eye. Hurried bees had discovered them before him, since it is not enough for these restless innocent to store up summer in the honeycomb, but with the earliest warmth they must be out and seeking in hunger. He heard then the incessant whispering, the waters of the earth returning to the broader streams, to the sea, the sky, the earth again, the waters of spring.

Drifting away to the south pasture and the woods, Reuben heard also a catbird in a budding thicket, chuckling and mewling and singing in a dozen voices, attempting alone the merriment of a full choir, sounding the bravura of summer before its time, fantastic, strong and sweet as the reed of the horned god. Furry silver softness of pussy willows shone at the edge of the woods; further in, he found the never-distant symbols of struggle and pain, for the tips of the wild grape were becoming fingers, later to grow aggressive, cruel in silent pressure, though all they seek is an island of space in the sunlight. He heard the peeper frogs, the delicate violence in their amorous throats, and now and then the ponderous grumble of a big frog, not yet sustained in the organpoint of summer but large as the owl-voices that had been disturbing the night woods all winter long. He watched a robin carrying mud with a purpose, and other small architects concerned with the foundations of secret houses, and sat long silent in his watching; silent and thinking now and again of something said by Mr. Welland which seemed not unrelated to springtime and the nesting of birds: "I do believe in God, Reuben, but I must tell you my faith is rather like that of a man on a cloudy day who hath some notion the sun may come out before evening. Should the sky remain overcast he will not be too sadly dismayed and may fall asleep with ease. And I suggest, it is no belittling of mine own faith, that I reject the arrogance of certainty."

Silent—so long that a box turtle placed a blundering claw on his shoe before it understood that Reuben was no rock. Reuben moved his hand idly to make it withdraw hissing into the sanctuary; he held his foot motionless, until by degrees the little bothered head emerged, vague and sad like Jesse Plum's, and the creature lurched away to safety. Reuben forgot it, listening to the wind and the voices of a thousand hungers within him, almost but not quite seeing the airy rising in mist of castles in Spain, almost but not quite hearing the reed of the horned god that makes a mockery of everything but blind desire and the need to embrace the fleeing sun-dappled body in the country of Arcadia.

Then from near bushes another music streamed, three notes of purity, the last one twice repeated; notes at intervals true to the human scale but sung as no one sings them except a white-throated sparrow who has come home to April in New England. But even under the glow of this music Reuben's human brain must at once observe how bounteous nature includes the porcupine's quill festering in helpless flesh, the needle teeth of a weasel in a rabbit's neck, the scar on Ben Cory's lip, the drop of a hawk, smallpox, the death of Deerfield, a pencil sketch of unredeemable sorrow in Mr. Welland's surgery, the husband-eating habits of spiders, the right eye of the boy Wilks gouged out by a cutlass; and so it would seem there's no help for it, but the brain must continue, trying in some confusion to kill wolves and learn how to be content with discontent. It will not say: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? Such mock humility, Reuben thought, is iniquitous rubbish, in the presence of the whitethroat's music and the drawings of Vesalius, for if the human creature and the sparrow are not beings of wonder and infinite depth then nothing is wonderful under the North Star.

On cool mornings after fog, Ben Cory liked to search out the green of poplar bark still damp, a green softer and stranger than any other on earth, seeming translucent, leading the mind to green oceans.

Ben Cory knew as well as anyone that the country beyond the magic of poplar bark is not to be entered, and may be declared what you will.

There as here, like the reed of the horned god demanding and perilous, the west winds move beyond the green land and over blue-green waves remote from land.

The days crawled with inky toil into another Saturday afternoon, and Ben Cory was once more free to invade Boston. This time he could ride his mare to the Jenks house—ride like a gentleman, with a solid determination not to fall from grace, no, not in the lightest particular.

In the morning, Uncle John also had gone to Boston, as he seldom did on a Saturday. Since that evening a week ago when Ben had presumed to speak out, Uncle John had appeared withdrawn in a puzzling way—even more since the gray hours of the funeral—almost as though he regretted having allowed young Benjamin to talk up like a man. It created a background trouble for Ben's thought: maybe he had made a fool of himself after all; maybe on second thought Uncle John had found it downright insulting, the idea that his Artemis should abandon the rich journey to the Indies and operate like a cheap ferry tub in the coastal trade. Only background: even the fear he had managed to discuss with Reuben, that John Kenny's fortune might tumble suddenly at the assault of creditors, could not dominate such an afternoon as this, when the warmth of June had arrived to blend with the crystal freshness of the end of April, and the girl Faith was in the garden by the house, alone, kneeling to lift with a pink finger tip the golden face of a jonquil.

Ben jumped down, not able to look again and pretend to discover her until he had made a careful business of hitching his mare to the post in the street, rubbing the hairy foolish nose and murmuring the words old Molly usually required before she would stand quiet and go to dreaming in the sun. He could turn then, but (such is the bewildering skill of women) Faith was still engaged with the daffodil. Only at that moment did she rise, glance toward the house, lift a hand in the light to push back a strand of hair under her little cap, brush away a clinging leaf from the softness of her brown skirt, and then at long last step away from the bed of flowers to find Ben Cory at the gate, with a wondrous flush of surprise. "Oh, Benjamin, you startled me!" Her right hand jumped to her mouth, blue eyes laughing over it in mirthful self-reproach at having used his first name when of course she ought to have spoken with proper reserve in spite of the violets swaying at her feet, and called him Mr. Cory.

"I didn't mean to. I'm not dangerous, now that's no lie."

"That, sir, remains to be seen. You did cause me to forget myself." She was still silently laughing—from natural good spirits, or from kindness, or because Ben Cory was the most comical savage under the sun. "Surprising me so, Mr. Cory!" That in drawling mimic reproach, as her hands held down the latch of the picket gate, in mimic warfare declining to open it.

"May I come in then?"

"Oh-h—mmm," she said, her tone a singing. "I'll consider it, I suppose. I suppose it would be cold and unkind if I obliged you to stand out there in the street. Though perhaps you ought to, as a punishment for surpri-ising me so."

"I'm most sorry for that."

"Are you now? Why, Mr. Cory, if I thought so I might decide you were a poor thing of no enterprise, and so away into the house closing the door, and you might sit out here lorn and lonely enough until the lamplighter cometh in the evening." She blinked both eyes. "Or I could send Charity to you, sir? With another picture maybe, so to keep you company?" She glanced down at her hands.

Out of breath in an April gust of wisdom, Ben lifted their unresisting warmth from the latch, opened it, found himself inside the garden and closing the gate without commotion. She had drawn away from him, laughter fallen from her like a ravished shield. Not too far away, grave, with veiled downward-looking eyes, the hands he had briefly touched holding each other as if for safety between her breasts. Ben could neither move nor speak unless she did so. "Would you like to come look at the daffodils? They were timid, Mr. Cory. They would not bloom in March, but now I think the sun's a little kinder."

The daffodils, yes, but not yet. Ben stooped to the purple glow and wind-stirred motion at his feet, plucked a single violet perfect in fragility and held it near her eyes, so that she must lift them presently to look at him, frightened with discovery, as young in all ways as himself and unsure. He recaptured the memory of a breath of music from the dingy library of John Kenny, and found a glory of pride that he could bring these words to himself out of some dusty hour that must have passed without love, and speak them for her pleasure, and not sound in the least like a fool.

"Ah! What's that?"

"The verse is—oh, if I remember, by Sir Henry Wotton, to his mistress the Queen of Bohemia. But I did make it mine," said Ben. "I made it mine, to give you today."

"Why—why, Ben!" He saw the tears start to her eyes. A few appeared on her cheeks. He could not touch them; understood how she must turn her face away quickly, for the tears were no pretense at all, and she as much startled by them as the boy who loved her—no part assigned to that sort of tears in the undertakings of mimic reproach and mimic warfare. "Is that why you came? To—to say something beautiful I couldn't forget, even though...."

"Even though——?"

She smiled down at dainty shoes that were somehow not very muddy in spite of the spring ground, trying again to be distant and a lady. "My mother and father, 'deed they'd be much put out to know I was speaking thus alone with you, Mr. Cory.... I meant to say: even though the words cannot be for me."

"Cannot—why, for you and no other, ever."

"Well, we might——" she glanced at the house, and at him, and at the house again, so that Ben grasped what she would never be so brazen as to put in words, namely that the stone seat on the other side of the bed of daffodils stood very near the house wall, and that this part of the wall was blind, without any windows to overlook the seat; that the jonquils would not tell and the stone would be warm in the sun so much like a sun of June. She sat there with a woman's grace; without a smile, shyly touched the stone beside her. The seat was small, yet she could only mean that he was to be there, that near to her, breathing her fragrance even as fantasies of twelve troubled nights had dwelt upon it. "Now tell me, Benjamin, tell me truly the reason that brought you here?"

"Oh, to—to pluck this violet, and look on it, whether it be, as they tell, the flower of modesty."

"Now you laugh at me."

"Never."

"Any scholar may laugh at me, Benjamin. I'm not learned."

"Nor I. But as I remember—well, not the books but what my mother used to say, maybe I ought to take from this garden a sprig of rosemary, but there'll be none in the bloom this time of year. Oh, Faith, I'm no scholar at all. My brother is the wise one."

"Ay, faraway Reuben. Monday, you know, was the first and only time I've laid eyes on him. I thought only his body was there, and he the other side of the moon—but of course a funeral is a poor time to meet anyone.... Rosemary? Why rosemary? Rosemary's for remembrance."

"That's what my mother used to tell. You see, I may be going away," said Ben, and at the moment quite believed it.

"Going away?" Her face was a new miracle because of nearness.

"You heard what happened to the Iris?"

"Oh!" She caught his hand in both her own. "Yes, I heard of course. You mean—what do you mean, Ben?"

"I ought to be out and earning my way. I spoke of it to Uncle John the other evening. You see"—and he found that he was speaking to her very much as he had done in certain dreams before the onset of sleep: reasonably, bravely, easily, finding words without stammering. This realization of a dream was in itself so great a wonder that he could take other marvels almost lightly, even the marvel of her thigh against his own, her two hands holding his one as if they desired never to let it go. He would sail, he said. He would learn all there was for him to know of the sea, for it was the mightiest of highways for human enterprise—and the world, said Ben, is scarce explored. Faith seemed astonished to learn how few were the names of great explorers.... If, said Ben, a shipowner of Boston could build his fortune soundly on the colonial trade until his resources were great enough so that no minor disaster need shake him, there was no reason why such a man—he was not completely sure at this point whether he meant himself or Uncle John Kenny—why such a man, later on, say when the present war was over, should not fit out a fleet, maybe five or six vessels as fast and good as Artemis but probably larger, and strike out for those parts of the incredible Pacific where anything might be found. Islands—continents.... Why should Spain and France sit a-straddle of half the known earth? For that matter, what did England herself really understand of the New World? "Oh," said Faith. "Why, this land of our own," said Ben—"I say this ought to be the heart and center for the exploration that's still to be done." And Faith watched him, shining, but presently let go his hand and turned her face away.

It dawned on Ben that this vision had been newborn of this moment. It was in the blue intensity of her eyes that those five or six vessels as fast and good as Artemis were setting out, breaking out the full splendor of white canvas and turning south—across the Line, and then the Horn? Or should they rather beat across the South Atlantic and round da Gama's Cape and so on through the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean toward their goal? Well, Shawn—Daniel Shawn would know what way they ought to go, and would go with them of course. But not just yet; not for a few years; not until.... Born of this moment, and so perhaps all his earlier imaginings of the sea had been no more than prelude—including those of a great while past, when he had never seen so much as the tame waters of Boston harbor, but his brother (at some moment of that past so far away that Ben could not now locate it in time or place) had said: "I'll go with thee to the Spice Islands."

Faith was saying: "I see those things for you. It's very fair and brave." She was not happy. "I see you will go away."

"Why, I'll come back."

"I don't know," said Faith to the faces of the jonquils. "I don't know, whether they ever do. I am not sure my father ever cometh back, Ben. He is here and not here."

For that Ben found no answer, but a new wave of courage allowed him to recapture her hand. "I suppose, Faith, it sounds as if I were talking the stuff of dreams."

"Brave dreams, but—why to me?"

"I think you made them."

"Oh, Ben, you'll break my heart. I am not—I—never mind, I don't wish to speak of it. But you should not be telling these things to me. I should not allow it. When we first met I thought you were only a green boy. Now I see you're—not, quite, and I...."

His own courage amazing him, Ben said: "And thou, Faith? How old art thou?"

"I am seventeen. But women are much older."

"I have heard that, and don't believe it."

"Oh! Oh! Must I now be angered with you?"

"No," said Ben, still dizzily courageous—"no, you must not. But you must tell me why you should be suddenly distressed, and—and why I shouldn't tell you what's in my heart. What is it, Faith?" The courage, he supposed, could hardly last much longer, but he could take some pride in it, this courage faintly like cruelty, that seemed to have swept away her needless defenses.

"We should not be speaking thus together." As though the dutiful assertion itself had given her confidence, she went on more tranquilly: "Have you ever thought, Benjamin—but, la, why should you?—that the lot of women is none so easy? We must stay at home. In many concerns we may not even speak. We marry, d'you see, and bear children, and must mind the house—no matter if those we love are on the far side of the earth, yet we must do that, and keep our own counsel too.... One day, Benjamin, I shall marry a rich man, and I hope"—but as she said it she clutched his hand and her eyes filled—"I hope and pray he'll have nothing whatsoever to do with the old gray sea. Oh, I will not marry a sailor, never! Only think," she said, warming to it and laughing now with some mischief—"he my husband shall be a pillar of the colony, like Judge Sewall, ha?—or even a royal governor, Benjamin, with such a wig!—oh, Ben, Ben, have I hurt thee?"

Helplessly Ben said: "I love thee."

She rose quickly and moved away. He dared not look up until she spoke again. "I am—sorry.... Marry, yes, and bear children and mind the house, and grow old little by little—why, that Magellan of yours, tell me, how long was he gone when he made the circuit of the world? I shall be old and gray when you—come back. Oh yes yes, an old gray dame with wrinkled cheeks and shaking hands, and belike I'll say, 'Why, grandchildren, I knew him, the great Benjamin Cory——'"

"Don't!" said Ben, and knew her hands were on his shoulders.

One of them curled under his chin to lift his face. "There!" she said—"do you see? You see what a naughty heartless old woman I am already? But promise me, Ben—promise me you will come back."

Ben knew he could have stood up then and kissed her—if someone had not passed by in the street. Faith herself seemed not displeased by that intrusion of alien noise, only took her hands away and stood back smiling at him, the moment irretrievable. "I will come back."

"Ben, I wish I had known you'd be here today. We have a guest arriving soon—I must dress, and aid Mama with a few things, and I cannot invite you to stay. I wish I might, but you understand—not my place to do so, and I dare say Mama would be upset."

"Of course."

"But you will come again—that is, if you wish to," she said, and laughed herself at the high absurdity of the notion that a time could ever come when he would not wish to see her.

"Of course—whenever I may, Faith."

"I do wish you might stay this evening, but—well, 'tis a——" she sighed in some private trouble or exasperation, moving her hands vaguely—"one of those occasions."

Dimly frightened and not intending his own words, Ben asked: "Someone important?"

Faith made a wry face. "He would think so." Her hands sketched a wig on her head, and she strutted a little in mimicry of self-importance. "A man of substance, la. A little wintry in years to be sure. A merchant, a pillar of the church, and a—widower."

"I see...."

"Take care," she said with what might be a show of real anger, "that you do not see too much. He is a good man—I am sorry I was so naughty and forward as to make light of him. Good day, Mr. Cory!" Then in a lightning change at sight of his stricken face, Faith hurried to him and framed his face in her hands and whispered: "Did I not make you promise to come back? Oh, make your voyages—if you must. Make them for me, Ben, and forgive my cruelty!"

"You——"

Lightly and quickly, Faith kissed his lips. "Queer little scar," she said, and touched it with a finger tip, breathing hard. "Tell me of it some time. Why, I—Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years." And she ran away across the garden, vanished utterly, in some place where Ben supposed there would be a door to safety.

He passed through the gate in a golden haze. Molly was restless. She meant no disrespect, but sometimes found it humorous to fidget and dance ponderously at the moment he was lifting his foot for the stirrup. She did so now, perhaps in comment at the obvious remoteness of Ben's mortal mind. It had the effect of drawing him back to the present world, a few mild expletives quivering on the edge of utterance, when the brown girl Clarissa, returning from some bit of marketing with a parcel under her arm, observed his difficulty, set the parcel on the steps and came to him. "May I hold her for you, sir?"

"Oh, thanks!" Ben smiled without knowing it, and mounted easily as she competently held the bridle and stroked Molly's friendly repentant nose. He was in the saddle, but her hand remained there a moment longer, and her look held him, a look profounder than a touch, demanding nothing, declaring nothing except some kind of understanding which (until he thought about it later) seemed to Ben quite natural. As if they, the two of them alone, understood and recognized certain things that concerned no one else, that no one else had ever guessed.

Clarissa spoke also, quietly, looking up at him in the sun with no smile: "Good fortune, wherever you go."

"And to you," said Ben—involuntarily, in a way, or because no other words could possibly have been spoken. She turned aside to take up her parcel, and Ben rode home—across Boston Neck, past the waters of Gallows Bay, the marshes and the quicksands.

In the nights that followed Ben's return from Boston with a glowing dreambound face, April became May, but Reuben did not slip outdoors while the house was slumbering to walk in the dark woods. He had done so sometimes last year and the year before—usually on summer nights of light airs and starshine when beauty like something dangerous commanded him to approach, even though it be madness or immolation, because to retreat was a sure kind of dying. The summery warmth was continuing; the nights following Ben's return were as soft and full of sorcery as any that had ever called outside his window, but Reuben did not go. A certain new trouble had come on him, and part of it was a simple and shameful physical fear, like that of the boy who watched the careful advance of a wolf.

Shawn—that devil Shawn.

To Reuben, on the morning after Jan Dyckman's death, the office at the warehouse had stunk of guilt from the moment Shawn strode into it. He could rule that out as a morbid fancy for which Mr. Welland might have chided him; he could damn himself half-heartedly for owning a suspicious nature; nevertheless one fact remained clear to him (and apparently to nobody else): the death of Jan Dyckman was simply too convenient for Mr. Shawn, and Shawn was a man driven by a demon of ambition. Never mind whether the ambition itself was good or bad: whatever it was, Reuben felt, it crowded to fullness that part of the man's nature which in most human beings held the capacity for love, kindness, and compromise with the needs of other lives.

And now, Reuben knew, he would find no calm out there in the calling, sweet-breathing night if he must imagine that devil Shawn behind every tree, and fear the moonlight itself because it would illuminate his body for—what? A knife-throw? A lethal rush?

Once Reuben had supposed that everyone possessed something like his own electric awareness of the emotional state of others. In school at Deerfield he used to foresee disaster whenever the teacher was about to break into rage at Johnny Hoyt or Tom Hawks or some other favorite butt; Reuben had never been wrong, wincing in sympathy for five or ten minutes before the ruler slammed on a palm or the birch was lifted in ceremony from the wall. At fifteen he still found it difficult to credit that few actually did possess that awareness. The thing itself, he guessed, was merely a sharp observation for tiny shifts of expression or inflections of the voice.... Shawn had reeked of guilt—but more. The large blue eyes had met Reuben's once above the glittering coin; and had understood.

Unable to suggest anything in the realm of proof, Reuben quailed at thought of speaking out. On Sunday, briefly alone with Uncle John, he did attempt it, and fumbled it; the old man was shocked, confused, a little angry and apparently not in a mood to listen; Reuben in misery cancelled his own words. After that, with pain but doggedly, Reuben considered the possibility that he was suffering from green vicious jealousy because Ben so plainly admired the big Irishman. But the one fact that needed no proof, the fact of the convenience of Jan Dyckman's death for a man who wished to be mate of Artemis, remained like a cold lump of indigestion, inescapable and sour.... That devil Shawn would not have used the knife himself. That would be Judas Marsh. It could be one-eyed Marsh behind the peaceful dark trees of John Kenny's orchard.

When Reuben could sleep at all, Shawn invaded sickly dreams, his features rather changed, sometimes carrying a flintlock, but always rubbing the brilliant coin, sardonically ready to tell Reuben something or other. His words (usually) were no more than "Floreat Rex"—but the Irishman's true meaning appeared to be that the house was afire, or that somebody, somewhere, was being flogged, and Reuben too much a womanish coward to do anything about it. "Floreat Rex," said Shawn, meaning also of course: "I think I'll cut that off—you can't plant anything with it." Three times Reuben woke in a sweat from such a snarling dream, the third and worst time being on the Saturday night after Ben's return from his hour with Faith in the garden—of which he told Reuben with shy self-deprecating astonishment, a need to speak, a need to marvel aloud that anyone could be as fortunate as himself.

On Monday night Reuben dreamed that he was (as he truly was) lying in his bed in this familiar lovely room, but frozen to immobility, the house as silent as though everyone had died and no wind would ever again rattle a shutter or chuckle outside in the expanding leaves. One sound, however, could be felt—leisured footsteps on the stairs. Reuben's eyes were glued shut; he knew that, knew also that the stairs were dark, the night-light somehow blown out; but with another kind of vision he could watch the man Shawn coming up-black patch over left eye, bright farthing in the busy fingers of the left hand, flintlock in the right. If Reuben could have spoken, as he tried to do, he would have said: "I killed a wolf." He could not. He knew that if he did, the man would merely lift him with gouging fingers under the cheekbones and toss him aside, because it was not for Reuben, or rather not only for Reuben, that he was gliding up the stairway. A halting then, a steady, purposeful raising of the flintlock until Reuben must stare down into the small black eye of the muzzle and understand that it was all over. Then waking, swift cool wave of understanding how once more the thing was a dream.

It had been much like that not so many years ago, when the dreams were of Hell.

The moon was not shining, but the sky was a field of a million untroubled lights. As Reuben got up and stretched a cramp out of his arms—his body must have been locked like iron in the dream—he could make out something of his brother's face, enough to sense the tranquillity of Ben's healthy sleep, and envy it.

Ben's smooth forehead was turned away; his hand, firm and large, curled childishly under his rounded chin. Ben's eyelashes were long as a girl's, darker than his brows and curling upward at the tips, darker than the thickening down on his lip that he must now shave every other day. Reuben sat quiet, staring in the dark, until the dim pattern of his brother's face was set free from natural bounds, became incomprehensibly vast, all else a background, then dizzyingly small and far away, unreachable as an image in the bottom of a well.

What are you? What am I?

What is fear?

What is happiness?—well, that arrives unsought, if at all: to seek it, I know, is to stumble in a quicksand; to wait wearily hoping for it is simply one tedious way of dying.

What if nothing is real at all except the present moment?

Why, if so, then eternity is only a word. As I look on him now, I look on him forever. But there's deception here, for we do move and change: eternity is a word.

If the present alone is real, then do we ourselves create it from moment to moment? What is memory? I remember looking over hemlocks to the North Star, and Ben looked there too, and I have no way of knowing, ever, what he saw. I remember a day of summer——

Mid-July, for the hay was ripe then, and Reuben and his mother were returning from carrying a noon meal and a jug of beer to the outer fields. Other men beside Father were there, and Ben too, and some other older children and women to help with the raking, but Reuben at seven years old was no use with a rake. He had been allowed to carry the beer, sipping one mouthful and no more on the way. This was the homeward journey, and she in a smiling mood, tanned cheeks flushed, dark eyes full of mischief.

She sat in the long grass by the palisade gate, sweeping her skirt about to cover her feet in one graceful glide of her arm, lightly as any young girl——

(And so she was of course. Always young. Never to be old.)

"Sit by me, Puppy." No one else was about: only the men in the fields now toylike with distance, a flock of cloud-sheep radiant in the lower sky, a bumblebee lighting with clumsy abruptness on Reuben's knee. "Ah, don't stir! He won't sting thee. See!—yellow packets on his legs, he's been a-gathering. Tell me where he's been and what did he see?" (Warmth of a laughing face expecting nonsense.)

"Why, Mother, he went away over England, away over France, even way away over Boston, and he went awa-a-ay over the places in Ben's Hakluyt book where the Spice Islands are, and there was a king with ten thousand courtiers and he stung them. Every one."

"Now why? Did they do wrong?"

"They stole the king's beer."

"What, all ten thousand of 'em?"

"Every-each of the ten thousand."

"Now, love, what a selfish old pig the king must've been, for if there was beer enough for all ten thousand, I vow that was more than he'd ever drink alone, la?"

"Phoo, he was a big king."

"Ah, I see.... And was there a queen of the Spice Islands?"

"There was, and she did try to prevent them stealing the beer, but one would be tying spoons to her apron the while the rest was after it, she could no-way catch 'em."

"Wicked things!... Was she beautiful?"

"Ay, but not like you."

"Reuben, thou'lt have me weeping."

"Why, Mother? What for?"

"I don't know, Puppy. They say women must weep sometimes, if only because—I don't know.... Don't ever leave me."

On the same Monday night Ben Cory dreamed:

Faith arrived in the coach to call politely on those who lived in the stockade, and Ben was embarrassed for them, because they allowed her blue skirt to become draggled in the mud as she stepped from the coach at the stockade gate. She was not annoyed, but walked in grace to the inner citadel under the red parasol that Clarissa held unopened above her head. Ben shook hands with her pleasantly, and climbed with the girl named Clarity up the long spiral ladder to the top of the citadel. "Deerfield hath no citadel," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing. From this eyrie they could watch the country beyond the stockade, while in the inner rooms far below, Faith and some friend of Uncle John's were enjoying cakes and coffee and Madeira. "Like crosstrees," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing, and she placed her brown sweet sunlit hands at the edge of their perch and pulled at it to make it set up an agreeable swaying, entertaining as a swing in a garden.

The forest beyond the stockade was alive with gray dogs.

"He is compassed about," Ben said, knowing Clarity shared his anxiety. "He may be obliged to sell a tetradrachm of the time of Dyckman." Clarity nodded, moving their crow's-nest back and forth with her little brown hands, so that he could see her body arch and sway, arch and sway, bending and straightening as the wind blew her hair back to him and hid her face from time to time—still he could look down and see Faith walking out through the stockade walls into the woods. The parasol was the only thing the gray dogs were likely to desire, and Clarity had that now, under her arm; therefore the dogs were not likely to attack Faith, but Ben nevertheless felt a certain gloom, because she was too far away, too far down for him to shout a warning. No real danger of course. He said to Clarity: "Mind that thing, Mistress Coronal—I must be going."

"Rest, John! All evening you was like a cat on a hot stove, la, and all Sunday too. Can't you sleep? Can't I help you sleep?"

"I'd have been lost long ago but for your kindness, Kate."

"Oh, now! Something hot to drink? I could get it easy."

"I had enough in the evening, or too much. Besides, dear, I'm not certain the boys are asleep. Heard some stirring. One of them opening the window or the like. I don't think Ru's been sleeping well—red-eyed in the morning, and d'you know I can't ask? Don't know how."

"Don't fret so—'tis only their time of life. Both brave boys, and will be grand men. In a few years you'll have no cause for anything but pride in 'em, the both of 'em."

"That's true.... Kate, it would not much amaze me if the boys—Reuben at least—were quite aware that sometimes I come up here to thy room at night. They'd never speak, never show the knowledge by so much as a look; I think they'd never even discuss it with each other alone; and neither would have any unkind thought about it."

"Oh.... All the same——"

"I know. Best to remain discreet. Still, if we were wed——"

"It's not fitting, John. The gossip that's gone on about us, all these years, it's become a—a—what's the word I want?"

"A commonplace?"

"Yes, of course—that, with a pox. But don't you see?—if we was to wed now there'd be talk of another kind, and then—then I must be Madam Kenny and bear it like a lady, which I am not, John, and cannot be. Oh, let be as it is! I'd be most wretched, John—truly.... As you say, the boys would never speak of it. I know them too. I love them too, John."

"Well.... If it were spoken I suppose Ben would be—embarrassed, let us say, because he's much aware of social opinion. And Reuben—who looketh down upon social opinion from his own mountaintop like a puzzled angel—Reuben would hold some thought about it which I could never understand, never interpret—Kate, I don't know them!... I can't see my own youth, Kate. I think of it. A thousand things keep coming back to me now that never did so in my fifties, or sixties—my father's sniff, my Aunt Jessica's passion for setting the furniture exactly parallel to the walls and washing her hands a hundred times a day—damme, the very shape of a knot in the ash stick my father used for correcting me, and didn't I count it a great thing won if I was hit with the plain part of the stick and not with the knob! How Ru would have loathed him! I did too, but a long time after he was dead I suppose I acquired a certain comprehension, even gratitude in some matters. Well, those things come back, but only like little pictures, Kate. I can't feel how it was, to be a youth of Ben's age. I only know that once I was, and that in a world nothing like the one they live in, nothing like.... Mr. Welland stopped by at my office today."

"Mr. Welland!"

"Nay, nothing to do with illness. I now learn, Kate, that our Reuben hath suddenly decided he wishes to study medicine."

"Marry come up!"

"Ye-es. Well, I wish he might have discussed it with me first, but from what Mr. Welland told me, I believe the thought came suddenly, and I suppose Ru felt unready to speak to me about it, and Mr. Welland being in town anyway on some other errand—mph, anyway, so it is. Maybe a passing thing—but Welland seemed to think not, and was earnest, nay almost impassioned in telling me he thought the boy had a true call to it. I like Welland of course—honest man, courteous too, said he would be pleased to take Reuben as apprentice, by whatever arrangement suited my own plans for him. Man of learning too—I found we share many interests.... Damn the thing, I could have wished better for Reuben than—oh, pills, syrups, the whining of sick people, exposing himself to dangerous ills, but...."

"That's what troubled you today?"

"Uh—well, no. Of course I must have some talk with Reuben about this in—well, in a day or two...."

"Tell Kate."

"Kate, I have done a thing, the which seemed right to me at the time, and still does, but...."

"Tell Kate."

"Artemis is to sail tomorrow. The Tuesday afternoon, if the weather be right. The sky's clear tonight—I dare say it will be fair."

"Oh?"

"Ay—Barbados. And Ben does not know it, Kate, and will not know it until she is gone."

"Oh, John!"

"I know. Now let me try to tell thee: Ben was most desirous to sail—you knew that—and I—I can't have it, Kate. Not now, and he so young—the hardships, and his study disrupted, all that. A while ago—a week ago Saturday, I think—he spoke to me of this. He had the thought that Artemis might make a quick passage to New York. It was reasonable. He'd given it much thought evidently, and spoke up every inch a man, I was obliged to consider it, though I still think my own judgment is best, and so—so she's for Barbados, and will surely bring enough on her return to clear away—certain debts, and put us in good posture for some time to come.... Well, let it be I'm simply a coward, Kate: I could not face him, and tell him he was not to go—that is, not now, when I—I tell thee, Kate, I can't quite seem to recover from what happened to Iris. Not as I used to recover from such misfortune. Why, when Hera was lost—oh, I'm getting old. I simply could not bear to see the light go out of him, as I knew it would."

"But later, when he's bound to know——"

"Kate—dear—don't you think it may be better for him to meet it as a thing already done, no room for discussion?"

"Oh, I don't know, John. He—it's not for me to say."

"But you know I wish to hear whatever you think."

"I—don't know. Some-way, it don't seem...."

"You think he may be angry with me?"

"I never saw Ben angry. Could be, I vow, if he was hurt."

"And you think this may hurt him, too much?"

"I—don't know, John. It seemed right to you, and—oh dearie me——"

"Well, there, never mind. It's done. I sha'n't tell him till tomorrow. Nor Reuben of course, seeing I can't burden him with the obligation to keep a secret from his brother.... I was obliged to cross Ben in one other particular—maybe it a'n't important. He put in a good word once or twice for Mr. Shawn, you see, to replace poor Jan. I considered it. I like Shawn well enough—I suppose. But then yesterday—ay, Sunday it was—Reuben said something, to me alone, that gave me pause."

"Reuben did! John, I—did not like that Mr. Shawn."

"You too?"

"I only glimpsed him the once, that evening he came here. I felt a coldness in him. I a'n't wise in the head, John, but my heart knows a little sometimes. I did feel a coldness."

"Not so far from what Reuben said. We were speaking of Jan's death, and Reuben said—blurted it, not his natural way at all, and I could see it cost him pain—Ru said: 'Ha'n't they even questioned him?' I was obliged to ask whom he meant. He said: 'Shawn, that devil Shawn.' He said: 'Will they not ask him concerning ends and means? Will they not ask him how far he would go to secure a vessel so to be another Francis Drake?' Well, I—I chided him, Kate—it shocked me, not only because he lacks a man's years. He apologized and said no more. But then today, it so happened another man applied—Will Hanson, New Haven man, a good sailor that Jenks knew from years past. Jenks wished to sign him on. I had meant to suggest Mr. Shawn, but I remembered what Reuben said and held my peace, and so—so Hanson will be mate when she sails tomorrow.... I'm getting old—fret and fume over decisions I'd've made a few years ago with a snap of the fingers—and been right too. Usually. Oh, my foot! God damn that bloody thing!"

"Lie still. You know it alway stops hurting if you lie still."

"Ah, you're kind."

"Why, John, you're mine in the sight of God. And you not even able to believe!—well, there, I made my peace with that too, long ago, for a'n't it what makes the world go 'round, a'n't I alway said so? Nay, love, never mind how I chatter. Try now if you can't get some sleep."