Later that night, after the guests returned to their rooms, after the kitchen was cleaned, the pots scrubbed, the dishes stacked and stored, Kevin made a final sweep of the house, shutting lamps and closing doors. He climbed upstairs to the master bedroom. Douglas was already under the covers with the lights off. With the excitement of the dinner, and the house partly full again, Kevin knew he wouldn’t easily get to sleep—not right away at least. He tiptoed to the window and sat in the seat and surveyed the lawn. Trees soughed outside, the sea sparkled in the night. Kevin heard Douglas ask from the bed: Is everything all right?

Fine, Kevin answered.

All of them have gone to bed?

Uh-hmm.

Kevin looked up at the moon. It had drifted now into a web of diaphanous clouds.

After a moment Douglas asked: What is it?

Nothing, Kevin replied.

Douglas waited. He knew, nights like this, all Kevin needed was the slightest prompting. And after a moment, sure enough, Kevin said: I was just thinking, that’s all.

Douglas silently shook his head; sometimes Kevin was so predictable.

And what were you thinking? he asked.

About the kingfishers.

Douglas sighed and threw off the covers and crossed the room. What had always delighted and infuriated him about Kevin were his grand classical references that seemed to come out of the blue. He sat beside him now in the window seat and crossed his ankles; and they both looked over the lawn a moment without speaking.

Well, Douglas finally said, leaning against the wall, are you going to tell me about the kingfishers? This must be a Greek story, right?

Yes. Kevin nodded, pleased. It’s the myth of the halcyon days.

And then he began to tell Douglas the story—as Douglas knew he would. It was all about a queen named Alcyone and a king named Ceyx, who lived on an island in the Aegean, and how they bragged about their perfect love, and how the gods, angered by their boasting, shipwrecked the king at sea. Kevin told Douglas about the shipwreck and how afterward, when the king’s body floated back to shore, Queen Alcyone, in her awful grief, leapt into the sea. Yet before she hit the water, the gods took pity on the queen and turned her into a bird: a kingfisher. She sprouted wings, a tail, a large beak, and then she kissed the king’s dead lips with her beak, and he came alive and changed right then into a kingfisher too. They flew off together, the king and queen, and each year for a week in winter, Kevin explained, the gods calmed the oceans so the two birds could nest on the open sea. Those days of calm, Kevin said, were called “halcyon days,” because the word in Greek for kingfisher was “halcyon”; and that’s where the phrase comes from—the halcyon days—from the kingfishers.