The Great Room grew darker until they were all only shadows, floating in shadow. Sisi wrapped an arm around Gwenda’s waist. Outside the great windows, the gardeners and the rosebushes disappeared. Now you saw a neat little farm and rocky fields, sloping up toward the twilight bulk of a coniferous forest.

“Yes,” Aune said. “Exactly like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins. Now the world will have changed again. Maybe there is another farm or maybe it is all forest now.

“At the time of this story my great-grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My great-grandmother’s work was to take the cows to a meadow where the pasturage was rich in clover and sweet grasses. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them. In the evening she brought the herd home again. The path went along a ridge. On the near side she and her cows passed a closer meadow that her family did not use even though the pasturage looked very fine to my great-grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked something like a table.”

Outside the windows of Halfmark House, a tree formed itself in a grassy, sunken meadow.

“My great-grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own great-grandmother would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”

“Ugh,” Mei said. “Look!”

“Yes,” Aune said in her calm, uninflected voice. “Like that. One day my great-grandmother, her name was Aune, too, I should have said that first, I suppose, one day Aune was leading her cows home along the ridge and she looked down into the meadow. She saw the people eating and drinking at their table. And while she was looking down, they turned and looked at her. They began to wave at her, to beckon that she should come down and sit with them and eat and drink. But instead she turned away and went home and told her mother what had happened. And after that, her older brother, who was a very unimaginative boy, had the job of taking the cattle to the far pasture.”

The people at the table were waving at Gwenda and Mei and Portia and the rest of them now. Sullivan waved back.

“Creepy!” Portia said. “That was a good one. Maureen, didn’t you think so?”

“It was a good story,” Maureen said. “I liked the cows.”

“So not the point, Maureen,” Portia said. “Anyway.”