There was a great deal of noise now like static on the sound track, and though Gareth went on speaking one heard nothing more audible from him.

“Where is Warrior Creek, ma’am?” Sidney inquired, looking behind him, but Irene had her head down in her hands and evidently either did not hear him or was too upset to reply.

Then came a final shot of Gareth with his then rather long curly hair blowing in the considerable wind, with a merging close-­up of his eyes and forehead, both now serene. His mouth came open at the very end, but no sound emerged. But he had said something, and Sidney tried to form the lines of his own lips as he had seen Gareth do in order to refashion what he had pronounced. He had no success.

Damon turned on the lights, and Irene was smiling now.

They left the room together. The perfume of the peonies had vanished, and all around them one could inhale now a kind of strong leather odor, as though the reins and the bridle and the saddle depicted in the film had been brought into the room and set down somewhere. Outside too one heard dogs barking vociferously.

“He’s a bit under the weather today, so that I thought we would not ask you to go upstairs, Sidney . . .”

Vance’s brother showed such deep disappointment that she went on:

“Unless of course you do wish to.”

“I do.” He spoke to his own surprise in a kind of rude, loud, almost angry tone.

“I didn’t quite feel you should have to do what has to be done today. And which Damon is quite prepared to do until you are a bit more settled.”

“But I thought,” Sidney kept the angry tone in his voice predominant, “that I was to learn everything from the outset. . . . Have you had second thoughts about me, Mrs. Vaisey?”

“Please say Irene.”

He was silent.

“Second thoughts, never,” she spoke like one injured, and her gaze moved toward the upstairs. “But the task we have to do now is so unpleasant,” she defended her position.

“Then I welcome the unpleasantness, ma’am.”

She looked at him with considerable wonder.

“Did the film . . . help you in any way?” she inquired, like one who is stalling for time.

“He was, and he is a wonderful young man. . . . He rides like . . . he was the air itself, like . . . a spirit,” he concluded painfully. He had been going to say like a god, but he was shamed or timid of his great admiration for his charge.

“He won a good many awards at the rodeo,” the mother spoke with a kind of indifference now like one reading by request a newspaper write-­up.

“What task then is so unpleasant for me,” he chided her.

She waited some while. “His bowels haven’t moved for several days,” Irene said at last sharply. “Usually Damon and I . . .”