Many were the times in the last forty years that Old Pete had watched those two go off together as if they were kin. He could remember back to when Christina had come up from Boston and spent a winter with Ellen’s family, when they were eleven or twelve years old. Christina had married into the Chapman clan, and they went back three generations, among the earliest of the summer people, built a grand place on top of the hill, raised horses and sheep for the fun of it, kept gardeners and stable boys. They came with the swallows and left after Thanksgiving. No one could call them natives. They had a smoother grain. They had not had to struggle just to keep alive, like Ellen and her family, and the difference showed in the two women’s faces. Christina stood straight as ever, held her head high, and showed hardly a wrinkle except that deep one between her eyes that made her look curiously intent. But her dark blue eyes could still take a man by surprise with the fire that flashed out when she was pleased or angered.

Ellen showed the strain of the winters, the strain of a hard life. Her thin face was covered with a veil of fine wrinkles now. Her brown eyes had sunk deep into the bone with time. But she had kept her slim figure, and from the back, as Old Pete watched her now, she might have been a girl.

A sight like this would keep him dreaming for the next hour. He had moved about the village from one abandoned sugarhouse or shack to another for the past sixty years, unwilling to work more than now and then, a living encyclopedia of Willard lore, a great talker, hunter, and fisherman. He knew the rich, for he and his dog, Flicker, hunted and fished with them, and he knew the poor as one of them. In the winter he sat by many a stove and gossiped. But he had not been welcome at Ellen’s, because he liked to drink as well as Rufus, her husband, and when Rufus got liquor in him he had been a hard man to live with. Ellen had managed by sheer grit, and by her silences that surely had been punishment for that gregarious man.

“Seems like the women around here have been given a grain or two more pluck than the men, and that’s an odd thing.” Old Pete sat down to cogitate, for he was not a man to let an idea go unchewed over, especially as thinking gave him a chance to light his pipe and lay his ax down.

Christina lifted her head and flashed a smile at her companion. They were walking under a golden and scarlet cloud of maple leaves, and it was irresistible to look up and through to the blue overhead. You could get drunk on the color. It banged like a clash of cymbals.