Mark and Damien, their hands over their faces, stood in the center of the beamed, high-ceilinged dining room, surrounded by family and friends. The lights were dimmed. The air was filled with aromas, mixed, pungent, and subtle, from the splendid buffet that had been laid out on the long refectory table at one side of the room. It was a narrow sixteenth-century table that once belonged to an order of Flemish monks. On a visit to San Simeon, Richard Thorn had noticed the table in one of the dining rooms and had casually remarked to a close friend in the Hearst family how much he liked it. A few weeks later, the table had arrived in Chicago with a note: 'Give me lunch on this thing sometime.' Thorn had been stunned by his friend's generosity but immediately took advantage of the gift and had it shipped up to Lakeside. Now it supported the still considerable weight of the leftovers: smoked turkey, country ham, rare roast beef, salads, corn on the cob, and just about everything else necessary to give two sturdy young boys the strength to become adults.

Only the dessert was missing, and that was on its way.

'Can we look now?' asked Mark, from behind his hands.

'Not yet,' said Ann affectionately.

From the next room came the sound of male voices singing 'Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you...'

'Now?' asked Mark.

'Happy Birthday, Mark and Damien...' the male voices sang out.

'Now!' said Ann excitedly, and both boys dropped their hands simultaneously.

'Happy Birthday to you!' The song ended.

What they saw, coming through the double doors from the kitchen, and borne by their father, Atherton, and Pasarian, was a cake that seemed large enough to feed the entire enrollment of Davidson. It looked three stories high, and the top of the cake did not look like the top of a cake at all. It looked like Lake Geneva. In fact, it looked like the area of Lake Geneva that could be seen right through the dining room windows. And skating on the surface of this spun-sugar lake, lit by the thirteen candles that ringed the edge of the cake like night lights around the skating rinks of long ago, was a perfect little three-dimensional Currier and Ives print: turn-of-the-century skaters in long coats and wool mufflers, the women in bonnets, the men in formal high hats, all frozen in mid-step. A man who designed. Christmas windows for some of the most exclusive shops in Chicago had been persuaded to apply his artistry to a new medium, and he had created what was certainly the most enchanting, and possibly the most expensive, birthday cake ever seen by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Charles Dickens could have written a chapter about it.