“We must have borne left too far—that brook always was a deceiver—remember the time we tried to find watercress and came out, finally, miles from where we thought we were?”

“Bedraggled, all right, and pretty tuckered out.”

They exchanged a glance, mocking, tender, holding in it hundreds of such memories of escapades and all the tragedies and struggles that a long, rich life brings with it. The watercress walk, as Ellen remembered, had brought them close again after the four years when Christina was at Vassar—and, more often than not, off to Europe in the summer—and seemed to have gone off into the world of the rich forever.

By that time Ellen was married and Nick in rompers, and Rufus had been furious when she got home, late for lunch. He had never understood about Christina. How many times had he stormed at her, “They’re rich and we’re poor and never the twain shall meet!” At the bottom of his resentment was not envy but contempt. He was a proud man—proud of working as hard as he did, proud of getting up at four to milk. “That man” (as he called Cornelius) “doesn’t know the meaning of work.” But pride didn’t help Rufus in the end when things just got too hard and he began to drink to put fire in his stomach against defeat. Oh, she understood … but …

Christina saw the shadow on Ellen’s taut face as they moved on but said nothing. When two people have known each other this long, the past is near the surface. When they met now, everything opened up, joy, grief. They knew things about each other that no one else in the world knew—the moments of failure of nerve, the secret wounds. It was to Ellen that Christina confided her anguish over her eldest son, John, who had tried to commit suicide before he was forty and still suffered from periodic depression. Cornelius, shamed deeply by this failure so close to the marrow, had never been able to help.

“Now, Ellen, you’ve got to use that sixth sense of yours and get us out onto a road, my girl!”

“Well, we’ll have a try.”

Christina was slowed down by her knee and heard the good news from far off. “We’re all right, Christy! I’m out on the Mill Road … hurry up.”

That “Christy” induced a spurt of new energy. It had been her childhood name, but only Ellen ever used it now. It acted like a spur, and within a few minutes of tough scrambling under hemlocks again and over a broken stone wall and a rather perilous dump full of broken bottles, Christina emerged, panting, laughing with relief, onto the familiar road just a few yards from the Preckles’ old place.

“Bravo, old girl! I must admit I’ve had it!”

“It’s only ten minutes now down the hill to Old Pete’s and home.”