“A girl renamed me when I had at last broken with my mother. Liesl said it made me one of the twice-born. Had you thought that we are all three of the company of the twice-born? We have all rejected our beginnings and become something our parents could not have foreseen.”

“I can’t imagine your parents foreseeing that you would become a theorizer about myth and legend,” said Elsengrim. “Hard people—I remember them clearly. Hard people—especially your mother.”

“Wrong,” said I. And I told him how my mother had worked and schemed and devised a nest to keep him alive, and exulted when he decided to live. “She said you were a fighter, and she liked that.”

Now it was his turn to be disconcerted. “Do you mind if I have one of your cigars?” he said.

I do not smoke cigars, but the box he took from a shelf on the other side of the room might easily be mistaken for a humidor—rather a fine one. But as he took it down and rather superciliously blew dust from it his face changed.

He brought it over and laid it on the low table around which our chairs were grouped. “What’s this?” he asked.

“It is what it says it is,” said I.

The engraving on the silver plaque on the lid of the box was beautiful and clear, for I had chosen the script with care:

Requiescat in pace

MARY DEMPSTER

1888-1959

Here is the patience

and faith of the saints.

We looked at it for some time. Boy was first to speak.

“Why would you keep a thing like that with you?”

“A form of piety. A sense of guilt unexpiated. Indolence. I have always been meaning to put them in some proper place, but I haven’t found it yet.”

“Guilt?” said Eisengrim.

Here it was. Either I spoke now or I kept silence forever. Dunstan Ramsay counselled against revelation, but Fifth Business would not hear.

“Yes, guilt. Staunton and I robbed your mother of her sanity.” And I told them the story of the snowball.

“Too bad,” said Boy. “But if I may say so, Dunny, I think you’ve let the thing build up into something it never was. You unmarried men are terrible fretters. I threw the snowball—at least you say so, and for argument’s sake let that go—and you dodged it. It precipitated something which was probably going to happen anyhow. The difference between us is that you’ve brooded over it and I’ve forgotten it. We’ve both done far more important things since. I’m sorry if I was offensive to your mother, Dempster. But you know what boys are. Brutes, because they don’t know any better. But they grow up to be men.”

“Very important men. Men whom the Crown delighteth to honour,” said Eisengrim with an unpleasant laugh.

“Yes. If you expect me to be diffident about that, you’re wrong.”

“Men who retain something of the brutish boy, even,” said I.

“I don’t think I understand you.”