Suddenly Joel’s mood changed. It was as if he had been able to abstract himself from the place and the time, draw back and look at Cathy—the way she frowned and pushed her long hair back when she was puzzled or interested, and see himself, leaning against a tree trunk, and all around them the gauzy, fresh May day—and hold it like a bubble again in his hands.

“The thing about Willard for me—it’s like love. I mean it feels outside time. No one hurries here. That’s what I find so amazing. The place itself seems to lay a hand on my shoulder and tell me to take it easy, not to hurry anything.”

“Oh, yes,” Cathy breathed. “Oh, yes …”

“So we’ll go and find those flowers now,” Joel said gravely, and this time she didn’t pull her hand away.

“People come here who are not like us,” Cathy said, dragging an old beer can out from among the leaves.

“Summer people?” Joel asked, teasing her.

“More likely the toughies and their girls.”

But then she became wholly absorbed in feeling among the dank, wet leaves to follow a branch of arbutus, and pulled out a single frail, waxy, pink flower. “Here’s one!” she cried out. “Give me your knife, Joel—otherwise I’ll tear out the root!”

“There,” she said when she had carefully cut it off with a short stem and two leaves, “here’s the spring, the early spring of Willard. Smell it.”

“Mmm!” It was truly an amazing sweet fragrance, like nothing Joel had ever smelled before. “I see what you mean.”

“It’s a secret,” she said. “Keep it for me.” And he gathered in her smile and her long look with the flower. But there was nothing to say.

Together they spent a half hour of this wet, exciting treasure-hunt, dragging out pieces of crockery and beer cans, their hands scratched, nails broken, but drawn on by the not-impossible treasures to be seized on, one by one, most of them still waxy white, only a few deep pink, star-shaped, perfect.

“We’ve got to stop,” Cathy breathed. “Gram will wonder where I am!”

Joel gathered together the bunch and buried his nose in it.

“She’ll be grateful when she sees this!” He straightened up and grinned. “Well, I surely never imagined I could get this absorbed in tracking down a flower!”

They walked back to the village and up the hill fast, and mostly silent. Every now and then Cathy glanced over at Joel as if to be sure he was there at her side. And once in a while he smiled back at her.

“Oh, I forgot to say that Gram wants you for supper tomorrow. Eben Fifield will be there, and my Aunt Olivia. Oh, I am so anxious for you to meet her, Joel. She’s the one you’ll like!”