Then the young man, running softly, returned to his little Ford pickup truck and drove away.

On Friday evening, he came back. The Williamses had just sat down to dinner. They heard the opening and the closing of the front screen door; and Berry-berry’s voice: “Where is everybody?”

Annabel clenched her fists and looked at Ralph. Ralph stood up. Clinton, from where he sat, looked into the living room.

Before any of them could speak, Berry-berry had entered the room and was standing just inside the archway.

Clinton stared at him incredulously, as if his brother had been long dead, and now, suddenly, magically, his image had been evoked by the mummery of some wizard. Perhaps the most startling aspect of Berry-berry’s sudden appearance—indeed more difficult for Clinton to believe than any act of magic might have been—was the simple flesh-and-blood reality of his being there.

Though he knew him instantly, he found that he had forgotten many details of Berry-berry’s appearance. For instance, he had always thought of him as handsome in an oddly individual way, but now Clinton was aware of an actual impression of beauty. This impression was not even marred by the fact that Berry-berry’s eyes were slightly bloodshot and that his skin had taken on an unhealthy, almost greenish pallor; these were defects that seemed only to enhance.

He wore khaki trousers and a long-sleeved sweat shirt. His feet were bare. His hair needed cutting; it was of a dark chestnut color with streaks of red in it, a mass of large unruly waves that contributed to an over-all look of wildness about him. He was a six-footer, slender, with broad shoulders and slim hips. If he did not give an appearance of height, it was because of his posture: his weight usually rested on one leg, and he held his head down and to the side. He had a fine face with prominent cheekbones, a strong jaw, a deeply cleft chin, and eyes that were rather small, but of a vivid blue color.

There was in his appearance an over-all strangeness that would be remembered longer than anything else about him. More vivid and more disturbing than any of these features that can be clearly named and described was an unlikely combination of invisible elements, qualities usually thought of as opposed: weakness and strength, kindness and cruelty, ease and tension, humor and sadness. And the balance would shift from one pole to another with all the quickness of a blinking eye, a gesture of the body, a tilt of the head—or the sudden death of a smile.