So I am back again weighing should and ought against Cornelius’s needs, against what we have found here. And suddenly I remember how I felt the year they sent me to Ellen’s family and how I bloomed and was renewed. Can I deny such renewal to my own grandchild? Cathy and I are real friends. She will be very understanding. And I tell Cornelius that, after all, we know everything—or almost—about Willard except the young people. Cathy will bring young people into the Ark. I do not believe in segregating the old, or in indulging myself, for that matter.

Oh dear, how complicated life is! But in my heart I know we must welcome Cathy, and that we only quail as one does before any great influx of life because it brings demands as well as joys with it.

We still have a month, or nearly—a precious month. After all, that’s ages.

Part Three: A Stranger Comes to Willard

PART THREE

A Stranger Comes to Willard

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Cathy would have the attic room where the old rocking horse stood in one corner, only a few hairs on his tail left. There was a big oak table there, a bookcase, and a bed right by the window, facing the mountain. Christina had prepared it all with joy. She found an old patchwork quilt in one of the blanket chests, threw a red corduroy pillow on it, and took the Persian rug up from the guest room because it was blue and red and made the whole room suddenly warm. The faded, torn shade had been replaced with a new one. And she and Cornelius had spent an hour choosing books from the bookcase in the hall—Kipling’s poems, Louisa May Alcott, an American history and a child’s encyclopedia, the Oxford Book of English Verse, a bird book. Cathy would find them old-fashioned, no doubt. Later, on an impulse, Christina took up a book on American Indians, a book about woodpeckers, Ring of Bright Water, and a book on Tibet. As she arranged them in a row on the desk in a little wood bookstand that one of Cornelius’s uncles had carved, she realized how little she knew of Cathy, the inner person. Now in late March it was time for some new life to come into the Ark. The very idea of spring pulls one forward, and here in Willard they had to hold the idea of spring a very long time before any hope of being out of winter hazards and winter tedium could be realized. So this new element, fifteen-year-old despair and fifteen-year-old hopes and fears, was, after all, welcome.