“I heard. Will two hundred dollars be enough to start?” He nodded. She said, “On the train coming up, Mr. Miller said that he didn’t know if you were married or not. He couldn’t even guess.”

“Well, when I saw him regularly, I wasn’t so sure myself. Steffie and her mother were still in Port Smith. It’s been complicated.”

“It doesn’t seem that way now,” she said. “You aren’t living together, but you see each other—you want to see each other.”

“It’s still complicated.” He stopped there, thinking of what he had done on the telephone. Only a little while ago he had thought that he had had no reason for what he had felt when he had found Karen’s note; now, at this first chance, he had indulged in it with Steffie, chancing God-knew-what damage to her. Even the wildest fears had anticipated nothing happening, just an ugly incommunicado in which things ran downhill: it was a well-charted territory in their lives. The other mistake he had made, in telling anything to Mrs. MacIver, was in trying to be honest. He didn’t know why he hadn’t lied. The result was that he had looked back. He had tried it rarely in the past and never did it now. In the fourteen years he and Karen had been married they had been separated by the war for three years and by their own actions for more than six: almost ten years in total and, on the face of it, unbearable. It had not seemed that way, and he still refused to believe that the arithmetic was going to weigh them down. Since she had followed him to Manitou they had lived one day to the next in a hopeful circling of a normal life; but finally, together, they were too frightened by the past to take the single necessary step. One consequence was that they were more sensitive to each other than most couples; another was that each lived with an irritation that had been covered, layer by layer, by the need and understanding they shared: loneliness, a pearl seed.

He would see Steffie tonight. He hadn’t been fooling about the rummy match. He said, “If you look behind you on the bookcases you’ll see two of Steffie’s creations. She made those airplanes for me when she was nine.”

Mrs. MacIver twisted around. “Oh? Why, they’re very good. They were the planes you flew in the war.” She smiled. “Is she Daddy’s girl?”

“Mommy’s, too. With us she’s very adult and sophisticated, but when she’s with other people—we hear about it—she’s still quite shy.”

“That’s sweet. Your complications don’t seem to have bothered her.”