Vance had thought the sun rose and set in Sidney, or so everybody said, but you didn’t need anybody to say it for you, you just had to watch. Dr. Ulric had once seen Vance lacing up Sidney’s boots at the start of hunting season. There was a peaceful expression on the boy’s face which recalled the look some people have when receiving the host. It had given the doctor pause.

The day or rather the morning after Sidney had killed his hunting companion, Vance had been afraid to go home. With his brother already in jail, he had been ashamed to be seen on the streets. For a while he had thought he would step into the First Presbyterian Church and occupy one of the back pews, but even here he was sure he would be observed or that his presence in the church be explained as counterfeit piety. Later on for a while he had gone into the depths of the cornfield behind Doc Ulric’s. Both the moving corn and the lights from the doctor’s house comforted him. But the damp in the cornfield (it was rather cold for August) and a rat running over his shoes made him, together with the terror of returning to an empty house, go up the back steps of the doctor’s house and rap on the screen door.

“I wondered when you’d show up,” Dr. Ulric had said. “Sit over there why don’t you . . .”

Another peculiar thing about Dr. Ulric was that though known for his bountifulness, compassion and devotion to the lives of his patients he was almost never seen to smile. His face was not sour or bitter, nonetheless, but some said (perhaps wrongly) that it was disappointed in aspect.

Vance had kept the tears back with the firmness and strength of a man who is determined to hang himself albeit with a poor cord, but now seated in the best chair in the house, with the doctor smoking peaceably nearby, and with the quiet of the countryside broken only by the songs of crickets and katydids, short convulsive sobs rose out of the corner he occupied.

Dr. Ulric’s one pleasure in life outside of his dark imported cigarettes was, when he got started, talking—talking not so much to you as around you, it didn’t matter who the patient was when he got started. He had been known also to talk to his cat, and these lengthy speeches usually touched on medicine, and came helped by his having read most of the 5,000 books in his library which spilled all over his fifteen-­room pillared house.