“I thought if you would care to I would show you a film I made of Garey just two years ago . . . It takes only a few minutes . . . Would you want to see it, Sidney?”

“Oh, you know me, you know I do.”

There were times when she looked extraordinarily like her son. It was uncanny.

They went immediately into a small room which adjoined the rather oversumptuous—but forlorn from disuse—parlor, and Irene beckoned him to come sit in a mammoth flowered upholstered chair. She had already set up the projector, and she called now for the servant who seemed always to be waiting nearby for her summons. His name was Damon. He almost never showed any emotion, interest or even indication he saw or recognized anybody. Damon immediately adjusted the projector, and the single word, in black-­purplish letters,

GARETH

streamed across the somewhat oval-­shaped screen which Sidney had not at first observed against the back wall.

Mrs. Vaisey sat directly behind him on a kind of camp stool. Sidney was not certain whether Damon had left the room or not. He suspected he had not, but turned his head, was smiled at by Irene, and then caught a glimpse of Damon working the projector with contemptuous competence.

There was first a picture of the “former” Gareth in the horse stables, currying a white gelding spotted with gold markings. Next one saw him riding another more-­spirited horse about the track which was about a mile or more from the Vaisey house. There was a close-­up finally of Gareth standing with his one hand holding the reins and his other forming a tightly clenched fist. It was this close-­up which struck a kind of desperate unease in Sidney. The handsome boyish face, certainly full of health and even good humor, nonetheless had something in it—perhaps the expression lay in his mouth—which hinted at, what was it? Disaster probably. The disaster which Sidney knew had overtaken him, and which perhaps he was after all reading into the film itself. No, he thought, disaster still to come, and he shivered.

Then one caught a view of Gareth sitting alone near a haystack. Evening was falling; and since the film now unexpectedly had sound, one could hear the distant baying of dogs and then, almost as though the real Gareth, that is the Gareth upstairs, had suddenly decided to attend his own showing, one heard his speaking voice. However what he said was so garbled and unconnected with anything he was doing or which the film had shown before that Sidney, in extreme discomfiture, half rose, and then remembering where he was as quickly sat down. Gareth said:

I promised to meet him over near Warrior Creek, but my horse never liked to go that far for some reason. So I finally had to go on foot. The creek had gone dry though, and I wasn’t sure I had reached the right place after all. But he was waiting for me all right, and he said he would have waited if necessary till the ice caps had melted and the mountains turned to dust.