To John’s surprise, Hezekiah’s words brought tears to his eyes. “Would you, Hezekiah?” He blinked rapidly and his eyes cleared. “You see, now, you’ve moved this old man with your kindness. You found the one bribe I’m susceptible to.”

“It wasn’t flattery, sir.”

“I know,” said John. “It was honor. May God forgive me, but I’ve never been able to purge my heart of the desire for it.”

“There’s no sin in it, John. The honor of good men is won only by goodness. It’s how the children of God recognize each other. It’s the feast of love.”

“Maybe God did bring me here,” said John. “In answer to my own prayers.”

“Maybe that’s how God works,” said Hezekiah. “We pray for a messenger from God—who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?”

“What does that make me, an angel?”

“Wrestle with Jacob. Smite his thigh. Leave him limping.”

“Once your allusions were all to Homer and the Greek playwrights.”

“It’s the Bible now,” said Hezekiah. “I have more to fear from death than you do.”

“But longer to wait before it comes,” said John ruefully.

Hezekiah laughed, shook John’s hand, and left the table. John sat back down, tucked in, and finished. The meeting had been more emotional than John had expected, or than he cared for, truth be known. Emotions had a way of filling you up and then what did you do with them? You still had to go on about your life.

Except for Hezekiah Study. He had not gone about his life. His life had ended, all those years ago, back in Netticut, on the end of a couple of ropes.

And my life? When did it end? Because it has ended, I see that now. I’m like Hezekiah. I took a turn, or didn’t take a turn; I stopped, or failed to stop. I should have been something else. I should have been president of a fledgling nation of free men. Not a judge at a witch trial. Not a stout little man eating the dregs of his breakfast alone at table in a boardinghouse in Cambridge, waiting for Tom Jefferson, damn him, to die, so I can have the feeble satisfaction of outliving that bastard son of Liberty.

Oh, Tom. If only we could have been friends, I could have changed you, you could have changed me, we could have become in reality the statesmen you pretend to be and I wish I were.

Purity could hardly sleep all night. It was unbearable, yesterday, the running, running, running. And yet she bore it. That’s what surprised her. She sweated and panted but she kept on and on and on, and all the while she ran there was a kind of music in the back of her mind. As soon as she tried to listen to it, to find the melody of it, the sound retreated and all she could hear then was the throbbing of her pulse in her head, her own panting, her feet thudding on the grassy ground. But then she’d stagger a few steps and the music would come back and it would sustain her and...