Sam tugged out his watch and glanced at it. He needed to get out of here, away from this woman, home to his own. “Time to go back,” he said.

On the way out, they stopped at the counter to pay. Colonel Waddell said, “Blast it! Must have left my money in my other jacket. I fear I’m getting senile.”

“Never mind,” Sam said, handing a quarter to the girl behind the counter. “No change required.” At five cents a soda, the tip was extravagant. He wanted Gabrielle to notice.

She put a hand on his sleeve. “You must join us for supper one evening soon.”

“Thank you—of course.”

“Bring your wife. Her name is—?”

“Gray Ellen.”

She bit her lower lip. A curl of dark hair came loose from her chignon. “A lovely name,” she said, “lovely.”

Sam arrived home at six o’clock to an empty house. He’d stopped along the way to pick blue chrysanthemums from out front of St. Thomas’s—a minor revenge on Father Dennen—but now had no wife to receive his bouquet.

He flung his wrinkled jacket on a chair and heard the revolver thunk against the wood. He’d have to remember to put it away later. Gray Ellen didn’t even know he had it. He put the mums in a pitcher of water and left them on the kitchen counter, loosened his cravat, and settled into an Adirondack chair on the porch to wait.

Across town, in Brooklyn, Gray Ellen walked arm in arm with Ivanhoe Grant down Bladen Street. He’d practically kidnapped her from her classroom, and they’d ridden the streetcar into the heart of the Negro neighborhood. She was still wondering what she was doing here.

She had just been finishing up a spelling lesson, the last lesson of the day. The children were spelling in unison, “D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T, Democrat,” and “R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C-A-N, Republican.” She wanted them to be able to read the handbills come Election Day. She believed good spellers made better citizens.

The children giggled and vied with one another to see who could spell the loudest—they’d heard these words before. The little girls in the front row, sisters with tightly braided hair, recited in a single voice like a steam kettle. In the back, a huge, muscular boy recited in a clear tenor, almost a song. Somewhere in the middle, a skinny boy in filthy overalls croaked in a bullfrog bass, thumping out each letter. Gray Ellen loved the noise. It meant things were happening inside their heads. They were on their way to becoming people who could think for themselves.

This, she thought, her ears filled with children’s voices, is where I live. More than ever, she longed for a child of her own. She could take her to the beach, raise her on the soothing rush of the surf. Teach her, love her, continue herself into another age.