“I wonder how the old road will be.”

“So overgrown you won’t recognize it,” Ellen answered.

Then they were silent, absorbed in the walk itself, content to be together.

“You can still outpace me.” Christina stopped to catch her breath. “As you’ve been doing for the last sixty years. Sixty! Can you believe it, Ellen? Where has it all gone?”

“Seems like yesterday that we set out with a picnic basket and got lost up the minister’s hill, lost the trail altogether—do you remember?”

“We were fifteen then. We could still run away!” And Christina laughed her loud boyish laugh, which, Ellen thought, had not changed at all. “The worst thing about old age is that you can’t run away. Life has you all right—caught in such a net, it’s little short of a miracle to get off for a walk in the morning with an old friend. As it was, Cornelius didn’t want me to go. But I needed to see you, Ellen—I needed a breath of fresh air.”

“It can’t be easy for you, with him so down these days.”

“It’s harder on him. The stroke made him a cripple in a few seconds. After all, he played tennis when he was past sixty, sailed his own boat when he was seventy. It’s hard with all that in you to find it next to impossible to get up out of a chair. Hard to believe it was just six weeks ago.”

They had reached what had once been the entrance to the lumber road, but the town graders had torn up the whole bank and left huge boulders and rubble where, a few years before, painted trillium and wake-robin and small ferns had grown. The alders had grown up around old stumps.

“It’s horrible!” Christina called out, trying to pick a way in. “How can they do this to the roadside? Does nobody care?”

Ellen smiled a thin smile. Christina’s vehemence, her outrage before what could not be changed, had always amused her, for it seemed so innocent. She herself expected the worst and was never surprised when it happened. She followed her tall friend, scratching her face on a sharp twig, but at last they had scrambled their way through and stood in the tangle of brush, close to an old cellar hole where, in the eighteenth century, there had been a clothespin factory.

Now it was possible to discern a faint open path through the bracken and small trees.

“Well,” Ellen said, “there’s still a road anyway. Look, there’s a deer-hoof mark in the mud.”

“So it is. Think we might see one?”

“I doubt it, with all the dogs loose in the village these days. Why, the deer used to come right out on the green ten years ago, to get the windfalls. It’s a rare sight now.”