Mrs. Finn next door had one boy, Willie, ten years old. She was very particular about him. She had had concrete poured down all over her garden, making a hard gray surface where grass and flowers might have grown, so that Willie could play out there without getting mud on his shoes. Willie never went out there anyway. He preferred study to play. He stayed in his room and read his books and did his homework. He always got good marks in school. Mrs. Bagot had heard a good deal about Willie’s eternal industry, and she could have believed it all except that she had often seen him standing at the window of his room staring across at the tennis courts and down into her garden. She thought that perhaps the reason he shut himself up in his room so much was to escape from his talkative, bossy mother. He had the big back bedroom for his own, and his mother said he had his books and his desk and his writing materials and his maps all so neatly arranged that his room looked like a little monk’s cell.

There was no sign of Willie at his window today, and Mrs. Bagot thought his absence made the day more quiet. When he was there, she felt his eyes looking down on her, or imagined she did. He looked down at her as well as at everything else, and sometimes she waved up at him, although he never waved back. Once when she waved he put his head on one side, looking at her, and she was so surprised that she dropped her hand and then put it up again to wave at him, but he turned and vanished behind the thin net curtain that veiled his window. A few feet to the right of Willie Finn’s window was the window of the bedroom Lily and Margaret Bagot shared. Lily and Margaret slept together in a big brass bed. What sort of bed Willie Finn had Mrs. Bagot did not know, and she had no idea what his room really looked like. Mrs. Bagot had never been in the Finns’ house, and Mrs. Finn had never been in hers. Mrs. Finn and Mrs. Bagot held their conversations across the garden wall and that was the extent of their friendship, except for a greeting when they met occasionally outside their houses or down on the main road that ran past the end of the street on its way in to the heart of Dublin.