“I meant about strangers only that you and I are so close … I mean, everyone else seems miles away, because they don’t know—they can’t.—Look, Joel, it’s stars on earth and stars in the sky.” And it was really that, as they looked up through clusters of white flowers to those distant points of light. “Olivia has had love affairs, you see. I think there’s someone now—a doctor—he’s married.”

Joel nodded in the dark. It seemed amazing that anyone so old could be in love, but he was ready to grant that Olivia Chapman was no spinster aunt. “Their hang-ups are so different.”

“Explain,” Cathy said. She realized that, since Joel, she looked at everything in her life differently, even her magnificent aunt, as she always called Olivia in her heart.

“They don’t see that we—our generation—are responsible but in a different way. They think of supporting families, things like that, while we are trying to change the ethos. It was so typical of your grandfather to talk about earning a little time with his wife, as if he couldn’t make that time before he was eighty and had a stroke!”

“The trouble is they inherited an awful lot,” Cathy said. “It’s hard—maybe next to impossible—to lay aside that kind of thing—houses, I mean … oh, all that goes with their life.”

“Could you?” Joel asked, suddenly aware as he had not been before that Cathy was part of this world and she too would inherit.

“Easily,” she said, laughing suddenly, “but you see, Joel, I’m only fifteen. I mean, I’m still free to be myself. You’ve got to help me not to get caught, darling. Poets can’t be rich.”

“Wallace Stevens was.”

“That’s right. I’d forgotten about him.”

“Kiss me.”

Cathy leaned toward him and put her two hands along his cheeks—cool hands, like two leaves—and kissed him very tenderly. After a while words frayed out, she had discovered. They just had to be silent to find out what was happening.

Then Joel shivered. After all, they were sitting on his jacket.

“You’re cold. We’d better go back.”

They stood for a moment in the road, drinking in the spring sky. Somewhere a bird sang a brief song. Then it was absolutely silent.

“The silence of Willard,” Joel whispered. “Listen.”

The silence opened up, opened up the farthest line of woods, the hills, opened up the sky—it was huge. It seemed to absorb love and grief and parting into some great whole. They took deep breaths. Then, very slowly, they walked up the hill back to the Ark, hand in hand.

“No, I won’t come in,” Joel whispered. “I want to leave you here, darling,” and this time he didn’t kiss her but hugged her very hard and ran away down the road.