The road out of Ellsworth was overhung with maple trees and the smell of pine. Cocks were crowing. Thinking about College, he found himself thinking about the chicken story again, too. He ran his eye over the worsted of his trousers. The frock coat he wore had come from the best tailor in Chicago. His bag had a change of linen in it and a hairbrush with a pearl handle. The chicken was probably scared half to death as it set out, he thought – never mind how many roads it had crossed beforehand – wings beating, feathers flying, all that squawking. Several miles out of Ellsworth, the trail-like road emerged from the trees for a few hundred yards. The Atlantic ocean stretched out in shades of blue to the horizon; waves broke against an outcropping of rock a hundred feet below him. He wiped his palms on his trouser legs. The trouble, he thought irritably, was that when you got to the other side you more than likely made a goddamned fool of yourself – man or chicken – and what was funny about that?

It was nearly noon when he saw the house, a large structure made of three barns ballooning out from the rear of a tiny, two-story farmhouse. He circled it twice before he decided to try what looked like the front door. Nobody answered. Nobody answered at the first of the barn doors he tried either. Caught between relief and disappointment, he tried another door and heard footsteps inside. The door opened. A small, thin woman in bloomers peered out at him. Over her shoulders she wore a colorful scarf with a fringe that hung down past her waist, and her face was as pock-marked as College’s had been.

‘Yes?’ she said. Her fingers scurried to her temple and plucked a tuft of hair from the bun at the nape of her neck. Other tufts stuck out here and there all over her head like random feathers.

‘My name is Carrick, I—’

‘Carrick?’ She thrust her head toward him. ‘Carrick? Not Johnny Carrick by any chance?’

‘Yes, I—’

‘You are Johnny? Rayner’s Johnny?’ She turned away from him abruptly and shouted into the rooms beyond. ‘Seb! Seb! Come quick! It’s Johnny! He’s come to see us. Johnny’s here.’ She turned back and took him by the hand. ‘Oh, how good to see you, Johnny. How are—?’ she began, and then started on a second question before she’d got the first out: ‘Are you here for a—?’ Then on a third before the second was out: ‘How did you—?’ Broken sentences like the ones College had fallen into sometimes when he was upset.

The room she drew him into was the whole ground floor of one of the barns; one end was the kitchen, where two aproned women stood beyond a high work table attending to the stove. Eight people sat at the dining table that occupied most of the middle section of the room. At the end of the table a fat man fought to free himself from his chair. ‘Don’t run on so, Helen,’ the fat man said, pushing at the chair, which fell backward and crashed to the floor, ‘a man can’t answer so many questions at one go. Besides, you haven’t actually asked them. Well, well, well. So this is Johnny: Johnny at last. I’m Sebastian.’