It was disarming to hear him say, “You don’t like me today, Mrs. Ballantyne.”

They stopped at a one-room shack connected by a ramshackle passageway with a decent frame house. The door of the little dwelling was open and inside and outside, small children and big dogs were playing and scuffling and yapping and shouting. They became quiet, quiet as Ross stopped at the doorway, the children’s faces were upturned with the mute adoration that had been reflected in the faces of the children on the beach.

From his pocket Ross took a little sack of candy, he opened it and counted out a handful of hard bright balls. “One for each of you, that’s all, because sugar is good for you but too much is bad for your teeth. The rest of it is for my grandmother.”

“No teeth,” one of the boys said quickly.

“That’s right. Now out, kids, stay outside until we leave, I’m bringing visitors to see my grandmother.”

“Tourist?”

“No.”

He looked directly at Christine. “Grandmother lives alone because that’s what she wants to do, and she works because that makes her feel she isn’t a burden. In the old days, if food was too scarce in the winter, they sacrificed the old for the young. That isn’t true now, but she remembers it, I suppose. Or maybe it’s an atavistic thing. My uncle and his wife live next door here, and they look after her. She’s almost blind, but she wants to be as independent as—well, as you want to be I suppose, Chris.”

Standing in the doorway, peering into the dim musty room, they saw that Ross Guildenstern’s ancient grandmother was seated on a small tin oil drum which served as a chamber pot. She looked up brightly as they entered, her withered yellow face creased into a smile of a hundred wrinkles as she recognized his voice. She spoke his name.

“Wait just a minute, will you?” he said to Chris and Bridie. “Grandma’s on the can. I’ll put her back on her bed in a minute and then you can come in.”

“Oh, I guess I wasn’t a registered nurse all those years for no reason,” Bridie said, briskly. “Just let me in. You wait a minute, Chris.”

“I wish people would stop treating me like a feeble-minded child,” Chris said. The children stared at her, she looked at the children, feeling rather cross, then one of the small girls came to her and offered her the piece of candy Ross had given her. Suddenly Chris, as she shook her head in refusal, felt as though she were going to cry. Ross passed her carrying the tin can, she heard him emptying it in some sort of receptacle at the side of the house.

“Come on in, Chris,” he said now, as he returned.

“Why do I like you more for that, and admire you more than if you had just shot a large polar bear?” she asked.

“Sentiment,” Ross said.