Eben stood then with his back to the fire, the glass in his hand. He took a long swallow, as if it were medicine—medicine that he needed, and looked out past his guests through the windows opposite to a clump of white birch and the open field.

“The autumn light,” he said then, “heartbreaking. The thing is that when you get to be as old as I am you do a lot of thinking. You have splendid long meditations … but when it comes to doing”—he smiled down at them without bitterness—“you just ain’t got any gimp, as Mrs. Goodnow would say.”

“Jem should have asked you to do this chapter,” Tim ventured. “We are babes in the wood. It’s going to be a mess. Couldn’t you be a secret agent?”

“I’d get you into trouble.”

“Oh, please do,” Sally begged. She felt that at last they were close to getting inside all they had been outside of for five years.

“No, seriously,” Eben said, “I couldn’t do that to Jem. He’s chosen his writers with a definite end in view. This is to be a sunny celebration of ancient virtue and good citizenship as exemplified by the dear little town of Willard. You know that as well as I do.”

“But—” Sally hesitated, then decided to venture, “there is a lot to be said about Willard, even if it is a kind of failed town, as you think. I mean, people live here, and it seems to me the life has quality. Isn’t that partly why the summer people came, back there in the nineties? And now it’s more precious, because rarer than it was then.”

“Plenty of oddities to laugh about.” But Eben sensed that he had gone too far. “No … seriously … what is this ‘quality’? In what does it consist, would you say, Mrs. Webster?”

“I wish you’d call me Sally.”

“Very well”—and Eben gave a slight bow—“Sally, my dear.”

“Partly that people here have a contact with animals, trees, nature itself. In a city Old Pete would be a derelict sleeping under a bridge. Here—”

“He’s a derelict too.”

“Maybe, but hunting with Flicker he looks like his own man.”

“Oh, he’s his own man all right. Only works when he craves a six-pack … lives off the dump … there’s quality!”

Eben sat down again, nursing his drink.