Eben had been born in Willard. His father had been a farmer, farming inherited land, as his father had done before him. He himself went out into the world, starting as a lawyer and ending up with his finger in a good many pies. He had had something to do with rural electrification, had later invested in electronics, had become an international salesman for a coming firm, and from there had even ventured into diplomacy, when he had been an adviser to Conant in Germany. But he had never lost his love for Willard. And now in his old age he had come here to live with a housekeeper in the old family place. There had been rumors that he was writing a history of the town, but no one had heard much about this for years, and it was presumed that he had felt it beyond his strength, or given it up for one reason or another. “At any rate, you can’t fail to enjoy Eben. He’s a character,” Christina ended her briefing.

The Websters had been so busy reclaiming their own place that, after five summers, they still were discovering new parts of the town hidden away among the hills. The center of Willard looked extraordinarily rural and modest, as if perhaps a dozen families made up the whole population. Actually, there were two or three hundred houses scattered about in the woods, over by the pond lined with summer cottages, and up dirt roads. A stranger would imagine these roads led nowhere, certainly not to the wide variety of large houses, modern cabins, and small farms that helped bring the taxed families to around four hundred, about a third of whom were summer people.

Sally and Tim set off in fine spirits to discover Mr. Fifield, following Christina’s directions to climb up past the cemetery and past the Chapman place and then take the third dirt road on the right and be careful of rocks, but keep going up to a high field, and then they would see the Fifield place just over the crest, a white farmhouse with a big white barn attached to it. “Classic,” Christina had said, “even to the two huge elms in front planted by Eben’s great-grandfather when he built the house in 1800 or so.”

Tim was too busy navigating up the road, when they found it, to speak. Once a rock flew up and hit with a terrifying noise.

“No car that takes this road can afford a soft underbelly, I guess.”

“Mr. Fifield drives a Land Rover,” Sally explained.

The maple leaves had fallen here, and it was sometimes hard to see the rocks under that thick gold and red carpet.

“We could stop and walk the rest of the way,” she suggested, but Tim would not accept such a humiliation, and anyway they were up on the field now, driving across cut hay.

“There! There’s the mountain! Doesn’t it look splendid from here?”