“Yes,” Christina laughed. “I have been handed ‘The Women of Willard.’”

Eben’s eyebrows shot up ironically. “So you’re going to be a writer after all?”

“Don’t tease me.” Ease had come back to them now, but Christina looked at her watch anxiously. “Oh, dear, I must go. Cornelius doesn’t know where I am.” She caught Eben’s amused glance and blushed. “I didn’t tell him.”

“You’ll have to come back. ‘The Women of Willard’ is a rather rich theme for further conversations. I’ll look around and see what I have in my notes. Come back,” he said, “won’t you?” For Christina was standing, and he rose to go with her. “I’m going to take you down in the jeep.”

“Well, that would be a help.”

“Maybe I’ll have the strength now to cut down the peonies. Olive would scold me to have left them looking so dismal.”

“Oh, how you must miss her, Eben!” Christina stood in the road beside him as they looked out over the field and at the mountain. Perhaps he had not heard. He strode off to the barn to get the jeep and she waited for him with memories and images whirling through her mind—the excitement of Eben again, that electric current that had always been there between them, suddenly turned on. And Cornelius—she was impatient to be home, to tell him about Eben, to suggest that they invite him for Thanksgiving. Would that be wise? But she had not liked herself for admitting to Eben she had come secretly. That must be set right with Cornelius. And somehow—somehow she must persuade him to let Nick and Old Pete off.

“You know, one thing about getting old,” Eben said when she was sitting beside him in the jeep, “is that the past and the present flow together. The past doesn’t even begin to interest people until they are in their fifties. Then it begins to, at least about their own families, but when you get to be over seventy it’s not a matter of looking things up—they are just there all the time.” He shot Christina a quizzical look. “I’ve had long thoughts about my great-grandmother, Sophia, lately.”

Christina’s answer was cut off by a bounce as the jeep went over what felt like a boulder.

“We don’t know where we’re going but we know—or want to know—more and more about where we came from. Around here, it looks as though we had come from a strong breed of women.”

He drew the jeep up behind Christina’s car and for a moment they sat there.

“I don’t want to go, but I must,” Christina said.

“Well, if you must, you must. You’ve made the day glorious for me. You know that, of course.”