“No, it’s fun! Let me,” she begged as Christina moved to get up. “Don’t move, Gram. You and Gramp look so nice there.” For some reason Cathy had tears in her eyes. She felt queer and shaky inside, and seeing her grandparents together in a moment of intimacy like the one she had witnessed by accident sent a tremor, a sort of pang, through her.

At last they were all settled with drinks, Eben standing back to the fire, Cathy on the bear rug as usual. She had been allowed a glass of sherry at Eben’s insistence. “The child needs warming up,” he said, giving her a keen look. “Spring air—it has a chill in it.”

Olivia had stretched out her long legs on the sofa—slacks and the blue tunic she wore suited her. But Christina noticed how much gray there was threading through her red hair, and the lines of fatigue round her eyes. She was as tense as a coiled spring. They were all really suspended on the moment, waiting for Joel.

Before anyone else in the room heard the truck, Cathy had scrambled up and run out into the hall. The front door banged shut behind her. Christina got up from the arm of Cornelius’s chair and went to sit beside her daughter. Cornelius and Eben exchanged an amused look, and Eben turned to Olivia to whisper, “The stage seems to be set. Where are the actors?”

“Don’t make them into actors, poor dears,” Olivia said with a quick frown. She was thinking that it must be hard on the young, the way grown-up people looked on love at this age—with something like merriment, with, at any rate, a superiority of experience hard to swallow.

“‘Poor dears’!” Eben picked it up with a flash of his old impatience. “They’re young and in love. Must we pity them?”

“Where are they?” Cornelius asked crossly.

“Here we are, Gramp!” Cathy called as she opened the door.

She came in holding Joel’s hand and took him right to Olivia, with a look of such shining happiness in her eyes that it was as if she came into the room bearing a treasure.

“This is Joel,” she said. “My Aunt Olivia.”

What Olivia saw was someone tall, very thin, with long fair curly hair over his collar, dressed in blue jeans and a red lumberjack’s shirt. He gave her a quick, shy smile and went the rounds, shaking everyone’s hand rather nervously.

“I’m sorry to be late,” he said, “but we had to wait at the hospital—all sorts of papers to sign. It was hell.”

“You could do with a drink?” Eben asked.

“Thanks. I’m rather shaken up. Bourbon on the rocks—but I’ll be glad to get it, Mr. Fifield.”

“You stay there!”

“Did Nick mind terribly?” Christina asked. “I mean, he didn’t fight about going, did he?”