“Say hello to Lois for me,” he called out. “Bring her over if you come down to Reunion.”

“Of course we’ll come to Reunion,” their mother called back. “Ma never misses it, you know that.”

She gathered her skirts carefully about her away from the wheel, and leaned over to take the baby from their father’s arms.

“Let us hold her!” begged Lena.

Their mother stood up and lifted the baby over the backseat to them. They sat her up between them on the tufted tan cushion. In their excitement they clutched her arms so tightly that her big blue eyes welled with indignant tears.

“Don’t pinch,” admonished their mother, then called out, “Hurry, Harry, or we’ll never get there before dark.”

Their father went back to the house and to the barn again, then to the toolshed for no reason at all, except perhaps to say good-bye, just as the sunflowers beside the old playhouse seemed to be nodding good-bye. In this moment before leaving, the clouds stood still and seemed very low, as if they might even be stroked if one stood on the treetop and reached high. Above the clouds somewhere was London Junction, beyond the far-off pine fringe that rimmed this world was London Junction, on the other side of the West Woods, sunset boundary of the world, lay London Junction. The children’s eyes widened as the whip cracked and the voyage began.

“Good-bye, Dr. Bird. Good-bye, Mrs. Busby,” called their mother, waving her handkerchief. A skinny brown hand waved from the lace curtains of the big gray Busby house. Their mother kept waving her handkerchief all the way down Peach Street, as certain as were the children that the whole world was watching their departure. Sure enough, hands waved to them from windows, and passing the marketplace Mr. Charles, the butcher, waved his white apron, and Mr. Finney, the druggist, lifted his straw hat, and the delivery boy from the grocery store put down his basket to salute them like a soldier.

“Where are the kittens?” Lena suddenly asked.

“In the barn, all right,” said their father. “In the barn” sounded ominous to the two little girls who exchanged suspicious glances.

“Where’s Towser?” demanded Marcia. “Isn’t Towser going to London Junction? We’ve got to go back and get Towser.”

“Poor Towser!” sighed their mother. “Oh, Harry!”

“What’s happened to Towser?” wailed the girls, and then Florrie began to roar in the alarmingly efficient way she had, at two years old, perfected, so that the horse pricked up its ears and started to gallop, their mother reached back hastily to steady the baby, and Papa swore, pulling on the reins.

“Forget about Towser, damn it!” he shouted above the clatter of hoofs and wheels on the brick pavement. “We’ll get another dog in London Junction.”

“CITY LIMITS” their mother read out to them from a sign.

“Thirty miles now to London Junction,” said their father.

Now they really were past the sunset woods on the edge of the world, and their mother began to sing. They all sang with her. They sang, “There was an old sailor and he had a wooden leg,” and “Hark, hark the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town,” and “A frog he would a woo-ing go.” The baby stopped crying. Papa kept the whip out and the horse trotted along at a fine clip. They waved to farmhouses and shouted merry greetings to loads of hay; they waved to children perched on ladders picking cherries and to women at barnyard pumps rounding up geese, for they knew everyone. Mother had been brought up on a farm along here, her brothers’ families were strewn all around, and Papa, though he came from another county, knew everyone through managing the hotel and meeting the farmers who hitched every Saturday in the hotel square. But after awhile they did not know the farms; people in fields stared back at them instead of waving. Papa and their mother fell silent.