‘Don’t you do any such a thing, Fred. Let ’em learn how to get along by themselves for a while.’

‘Well, if you think so . . .’ he said.

And next morning when Hazel was brisk over the stove, and he came in with an armful of wood, feeling like Paul Bunyan, the god of the lumber-choppers, he crowed, ‘Are you happy?’

Once, placidly knitting on the shadow-dancing porch of William Tyler Longwhale, Hazel explained, ‘Of course you spoiled both our children. You always were a man to go to extremes. First you encourage ’em to walk over you, and then you fly right to the other extreme and want to run off to Abyssinia to get away from ’em.’

‘Maybe. But isn’t it the craziest doggone thing in this crazy world today, where half the nations are willing to go to war for the right to be slaves, that children have become the bossy parents, now, and the parents scared kids! Say, how did an easy-going couple like me and you ever have such a pair of Japanese waltzing mice for children?’

‘Spoiled ’em, I tell you. You AND me.’ Hazel was more placid than ever.

‘Maybe.’

‘Let’s go up to the King’s Arms and have a cocktail.’

‘Fine. Happy?’

‘So happy!’

On the seventh morning of their refuge in Stonefield, Fred awoke at six-thirty, too gay and clearheaded to lie abed. He marched out to the porch, down to the drift of pine needles, in his nightshirt and bare feet. He knew the earth was chilly, yet he did not seem to be chilled. ‘Reg’lar grizzly, that’s what I am!’ he gloated. The ticklish needles felt good to his feet, and the scent of pines and earth and grass and dew was a curtain shutting him away from the odours of gasoline and wet cement.

From inside he could hear the sleepy-headed Hazel grousing, ‘WHAT an hour to be getting up!’

He bellowed that she was to stay in bed. In the kitchen he plugged in the coffee percolator and returned to the porch to loll on a swing couch, violently at peace. He heard Hazel padding about the kitchen; she could not yet believe that a man could master so difficult a domestic task as measuring coffee and water into a percolator. She came out with two cups on a very fine tray which they had bought at the country store for ten cents; she perched beside him and kissed his cheek.

‘What say we take William Tyler Longwhale for all summer?’ suggested Fred. ‘Every couple weeks or so, I could go back to Sachem for maybe one day.’

‘Yes. Let’s! Oh, good heavens! Oh, NO!’

A Triumph Special sedan had slid out of the pine grove and up the grassy road to their porch, and out of it were dribbling Sara and Howard.

With suspicious sweetness, Sara commented, ‘Oh, Father! Bare feet? How cute!’

Fred glanced down. They looked worse than cute; they looked absurd, those objects called feet which till now he had taken for granted; those flat blobs of flesh, pallid from city living, fringed with imitation fingers. But he flung at Howard, bravely enough, ‘How d’you ever find us here?’