In fact she stayed too long. She was startled suddenly by the headlights of the car as Damon swung in, erratically, barely not grazing the garage door, arriving as he always did with a loud bang, dropping his brief case, slamming the garage doors shut (it was so bad for them) and calling out to her, “What are you doing there in the dark?”

“Looking at the sky, Damon—have you noticed it?” she called back, already running ahead to open the door, light the lamps, jerked back into his staccato tempo in spite of herself. Quickly she set a match to the wood fire in the study, lit the lamps there and disappeared behind the swing door into the kitchen to take a look at her casserole. In the distance she could hear Damon, crashing up the stairs, running water, his every gesture, it seemed, snapping another thread of the peace she had carefully built up in the last hours. In these moods he was like an engine running too fast for itself, a dangerous engine which might at any moment explode.

They met, she felt, at the end of each day like strangers, extending to each other the formal politeness of strangers. Damon mixed an old-fashioned; she took off her apron and sat down for the ritual half-hour or so when the entanglements and irritations of the day would be consciously laid aside. He had put on his red slippers, his old sweater, and stood, lanky, a little stooped, his lined irregular face which could look so distinguished, or—as it did now—so curiously disturbingly unfocused, the nose too strong, the mouth sensual and at the same time prim, his hair, as always, disheveled.

“God, I’m tired,” he announced, as if this were someone’s fault and could have been avoided.

“A bad day?” she asked automatically, as a nurse might ask an invalid.

“No worse than any other; we had a long committee meeting. Goldberg was in his element, laying down the law, arriving with masses of neat graphs and God knows what—Oh, it’s not that,” he said, running his hands through his hair.

“You haven’t heard anything from Edward, I suppose?”

“I don’t expect to.” The tone implied that she would have done better not to ask. He kicked a log with one foot, turning away from her, to lean his forehead on the mantel, an awkward gesture which she found unexpectedly touching.

“It’s rather childish of him, Damon, isn’t it really? You’ve been friends for twenty years.”