When Leon seemed hesitant and unsure of himself one day and gave Felix the sense of wanting to know if he should follow the laws of convention or personal inclination, Felix, assuming that some woman was on his mind, said, “Dear boy, so long as I wasn’t hurting anybody or confounding public morality I’ve always done what I wanted to do. I don’t think I’ve been sorry for anything I’ve done, but now that I’m not able to be immoral on any really ambitious scale, I do sometimes regret pieces of mischief I used to want to try and hung back from because of—oh, timidity, I suppose. Don’t do it. Have the courage of your desires, for God’s sake, or the Devil’s, perhaps I should say.”

Another time, in answer to a fumbled near-question, Felix said testily, not liking the role of mentor, “The choices we make are usually accidental, and then we spend the rest of our lives making the best or the worst of them.” He smiled to soften the acerbity he had heard in his tone. “Look at your own life. Did you plan it that way?”

“In other words,” Leon said, “you are saying it doesn’t matter.”

“Not at all. Whatever ‘it’ is always matters damnably. Now then, I’m tired of being uncle for the day and answering questions I don’t understand anyway. Is she pretty, hm? No offense, only jesting, my boy. Stella! Where are you?” She was there, of course. She was almost always there, but his consciousness admitted her or denied her as he wanted or did not want her. Turning back to Leon, Felix spoke his own vague suggestion. “If you don’t mind, I think I—”

“I’m just going, Uncle.” He left, and Stella closed the door after him.

Felix had long found it useful to suggest in such a way that he was tired, or that he felt the need to perform a private function, when he was merely bored for the moment with whoever was present and wanted to be alone. More and more he preferred his own company, and Stella’s, to that of any others. He thanked God for the accident that had brought him and Stella together.

The next time Leon stopped at Oaks, he was in his buggy, and he had come directly from the sawmill and hadn’t made up his mind whether or not to drive on to Highboro and the gin, or to go home and let things at the gin sort themselves, as he knew they would if he were not there. It was the middle of a hot afternoon at the beginning of September, and he found Annabel alone on the porch, dressed in a pretty new frock as if she had been waiting for him, or for someone.