“I want to talk,” he said gravely. “You and I are more important than that flower.”

“Oh, yes”—she nodded like a good child—“of course.”

“I just feel that you are so far away, Cathy … as if … as if …”—he lowered his eyes—“some door had closed between us.”

“I can’t help it, Joel,” she said, near to tears now. “But you said just now we had landed.”

“I thought we had.” He looked up then through the haze of buds and flowering trees overhead, a gauzy canopy between them and the sky here in the woods.

“I’m sorry I’m making it hard,” Cathy said.

“Kiss me then,” and he pulled her roughly to him and kissed her on the mouth, but not in the way she had found so disturbing. “Cathy, Cathy,” he said, laying the palm of his hand against her cheek, as if it were a leaf, she thought—such a cool, composing hand, so dear. “When you’re seventeen, I’ll be back. Will you wait for me?”

“Can’t we just be, as you say it … be all we can now?”

Joel gave a wry little laugh. “I guess I’m learning that being never stays still. We’re on our way, Cathy, toward being more or being less for each other.”

“Now it’s all become difficult,” she sighed. “Please, Joel, come and look for the mayflowers. You’ll see …”

His answer was a groan. “Sometimes it seems as if Willard—the whole place, the people, even the weather—were some strong magic … and it’s all on your side.”

“How?”

“When Nick talks about animals, the young does, or even about birds, the silent way an owl flies, he’s always saying, ‘Leave it alone, let it be itself.’ I’ve learned a lot from Nick, Cathy.”

“I know.”

“Nick sees the young things as always in danger. The tenderness of that man, Cathy! Oh well, I suppose all his love goes there. He’s made me think a lot about men and how they ruin everything by wanting to possess it—shoot the deer to possess it, shoot the woodcock as if they could only really have it by killing it.”

“Nick isn’t Willard, though. Willard is more cruel.”

“Yes, half the girls marry because they have to, I understand.” It was said harshly and Cathy took it like a blow.

“Just like the slums you talk about, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Cathy wouldn’t it be great if we could go somewhere together, into the city together, and do something about the mess?”

“Why not here?”

“Because this is a dream world, Cathy. The action is somewhere else.”

“I wonder … that’s what you say.”