One thing was for certain: staying where she was left no question about where she would be in a day or a week, or who she was likely to meet.

In the Valley of Light, she was known as one of the Three Widows—all wives of men who had been in the war. Two of the men—the husbands of Gladys Mabry and Martha Briggs—had been killed in battle, her own husband by his own doing.

Three widows waiting for new men.

There were men willing to approach her, and she knew it, but she knew also that they would keep their distance until she gave some signal that her time of mourning was over for her late husband.

She knew Taylor Bowers was one of those men, and the thought of him caused a smile that was as much amusement as pleasure. Taylor Bowers was friendly and handsome in his gangly way, and he had a manner of preening that reminded her of some of the characters she read about in her books. Always rushing to assist her in his store. Always asking if she needed anything done on the farm that required a man’s muscle.

When she gave the signal that her grief had ended, Taylor would be first in line at her door, and she did not know how she would handle him. It was comfortable enough being around him, but he did not cause the kind of unrest in her she had sensed the first time she looked into the eyes of Boyd Cunningham. With all his faults—and there were many—Boyd had had heat in his eyes.

The heat had been deceiving, had burned out shortly after his return from the war, but the memory of what had been was still buried somewhere, and it was tender, and, she guessed, was the reason she had not given the signal of being finished with her mourning. She had merely stayed busy, caring for the old woman and helping at the school with students having trouble with reading and mathematics.

She liked the teaching. If she had finished college, she would have become a teacher. One year at Young Harris College had given her some credibility as a substitute, as a helper, but not enough to hold a job.

She taught by a method of her own enterprise, calling it the Eureka Method.

When a child accomplished something—made out a word in a reading book and said it correctly by breaking down the syllables and then pushing out the word like a pearl formed on his or her tongue, or when one of them added or subtracted or divided numbers and got the right answer—she would have them exclaim, “Eureka!”

It was a sound of joy to Eleanor.

“Eureka!”

“Eureka!”

She had found the word in the Young Harris College library in a story about the Greek mathematician Archimedes. The story said eureka meant “I have found it.” What Archimedes had found was a way of determining the mix of gold and alloy in the crown of the king of Syracuse. She did not tell the students about Archimedes or the crown of the king of Syracuse. She wanted them to think of it as a word of magic, as a dot of light on a night as black as pitch.