“Do you like our valley, Mrs. Trask?”

“What? Oh, yes.”

“If it isn’t impertinent to ask, when is your baby due?”

“In about six weeks,” Adam said. “My wife is one of those paragons—a woman who does not talk very much.”

“Sometimes a silence tells the most,” said Samuel, and he saw Cathy’s eyes leap up and down again, and it seemed to him that the scar on her forehead grew darker. Something had flicked her the way you’d flick a horse with the braided string popper on a buggy whip. Samuel couldn’t recall what he had said that had made her give a small inward start. He felt a tenseness coming over him that was somewhat like the feeling he had just before the water wand pulled down, an awareness of something strange and strained. He glanced at Adam and saw that he was looking raptly at his wife. Whatever was strange was not strange to Adam. His face had happiness on it.

Cathy was chewing a piece of meat, chewing with her front teeth. Samuel had never seen anyone chew that way before. And when she had swallowed, her little tongue flicked around her lips. Samuel’s mind repeated, “Something—something—can’t find what it is. Something wrong,” and the silence hung on the table.

There was a shuffle behind him. He turned. Lee set a teapot on the table and shuffled away.

Samuel began to talk to push the silence away. He told how he had first come to the valley fresh from Ireland, but within a few words neither Cathy nor Adam was listening to him. To prove it, he used a trick he had devised to discover whether his children were listening when they begged him to read to them and would not let him stop. He threw in two sentences of nonsense. There was no response from either Adam or Cathy. He gave up.

He bolted his supper, drank his tea scalding hot, and folded his napkin. “Ma’am, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll ride off home. And I thank you for your hospitality.”

“Good night,” she said.

Adam jumped to his feet, He seemed torn out of a reverie. “Don’t go now. I hoped to persuade you to stay the night.”

“No, thank you, but that I can’t. And it’s not a long ride. I think—of course, I know—there’ll be a moon.”

“When will you start the wells?”

“I’ll have to get my rig together, do a piece of sharpening, and put my house in order. In a few days I’ll send the equipment with Tom.”

The life was flowing back into Adam. “Make it soon,” he said. “I want it soon. Cathy, we’re going to make the most beautiful place in the world. There’ll be nothing like it anywhere.”

Samuel switched his gaze to Cathy’s face. It did not change. The eyes were flat and the mouth with its small up-curve at the corners was carven.

“That will be nice,” she said.

For just a moment Samuel had an impulse to do or say something to shock her out of her distance. He shivered again.