With a gesture Leah Raffsky indicated that they were to follow her. As they ascended the stairs their bags awaited them in a neat row on the landing. There had been no sound of Norman’s return.

Christine had visualized bunks, prickly gray blankets and oil lamps. The walls of this upper hall, wide and bright, were painted pink. On either side the open doors revealed neat bedrooms furnished in modern light wood, you glimpsed bedside lamps and pale blue coverlets and flowered chintz. The windows were tightly shut, but from the bare yard of the unpainted little house across the way, where they sprawled or paced, you heard the high grating snarl and whine of the Malemutes.

Leah Raffsky made a little gesture toward this room and that. Chris and Bridie and Thor peered in. Bridie took over. “Now, Chris, if you want to take this one—it’s the cutest—I’ll take that one on the other side. Thor, which one you having?”

Thor was enjoying the look of incredulity on Chris’s face. “Any one. They’re all too luxurious for me, I’m not used to all this roughing it in the wilds of Alaska. Next year they’ll probably have a television in every room.” He swung the bags into the bedrooms and clumped down the stairs. When Bridie and Chris turned to speak to Leah Raffsky she had disappeared.

“What goes on here!” Chris demanded rather crossly.

From the far end of the long bright hall came the sound of muted music, there were girlish giggles and laughter and high young voices. Permeating all else, the air was fragrant with the scent of tender things being roasted, of sweet things being baked.

“It’s the Raffsky girls!” Bridie said. “I was wondering. Come along, Chris.” She rushed down the hall, Chris, following, saw her throw her arms about two girls in the doorway at the far end. “Chris, meet the two Raffsky girls, this one’s Elinor and this one’s Nancy.”

“Hi!” the two said, in unison. Each looked exactly like the other, and both looked exactly like Isador Raffsky. And Norman, Chris thought, looks just like their mother; it should have been the other way around. She now said hi in turn and was conscious of a slightly dazed feeling, inured though she had been since birth to the incongruities of Alaska.

She looked about her. On a vast blue velvet couch, a book in his hand, lay the elegant figure of Norman Raffsky. He did not glance up. A phonograph just beside the couch was playing a Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. On the floor was a deep-pile fawn-colored carpet that made a pleasant background for the blue chairs and couches, the pale pink walls. Half of one entire wall was a window of thick plate glass through which, separated only by a narrow strip of stony beach, you looked out across the gray shifting surge of Bering Strait and the dizzying ice floe just below.

“What an attractive room!” Chris said, rather lamely. She was bursting with unanswered questions, her lively curiosity had, all her life, been fostered by Thor. She wanted to find him now and ask him questions and questions and questions.