When Jonathan was well enough to get out of bed Bessie baked a whole ham for Sunday dinner; she basted it with sugar and fruit juice so that its fat turned black outside. During the meal Mr Finster struggled to interest Jonathan in the new Janney coupler.

‘A dazzling exemplar of man’s inventive genius,’ Mr Finster said. Mr Finster was much as before, round and pleased, though his muttonchops were thinner and his hands trembled. ‘It employs, sir, the principle that lies behind the hooked fingers of the human hand.’

‘How does it work?’ Jonathan tried to listen, but his glance kept straying to Sarah’s face, to the set of her shoulders, to her hands as she used her knife and fork, and his mind kept wandering off to that first day at the railroad yard in Denver when College had talked about link-and-pin couplers in terms of love and marriage. Jonathan carved a piece of sugary black coating from the ham on his plate. Why did College’s blood look black? Why does the color of light change things so? But his attention made an abrupt leap back to Sarah’s hands – not hooked at all. Enfolded? Was there a word graceful enough?

After they’d eaten, Mr Finster left to attend a train due in at the station. Jonathan went into the parlor with Bessie and Sarah, who sat in a wing chair in the far corner of the room and worked on a sampler.

‘I knew you right away, Jonathan,’ Bessie said. ‘I looked out the window and I said to Sarah here, I said, “That preacher out there, he carries himself like Jonathan.” And then when you tried to open the gate . . .’

Whenever Bessie paused Jonathan found himself straining to hear Sarah breathe.

‘But I couldn’t rightly believe it myself,’ Bessie went on. ‘My, my, you have grown handsome again, too, ain’t you?’ She surveyed Jonathan with pleasure. ‘But you still don’t smile, do you? How’d you get to be a preacher? We been right worried about you for years.’

‘I was afraid you might have forgot me.’

‘Forget you? Never. You were such a sad little mite – and so spirited – isn’t anybody in town has forgotten our Jonathan.’ She reached out and patted his knee. ‘I’m going out to those dishes. No, Sarah, you stay setting there. You don’t want to leave our guest all to himself, do you? Play him something. She plays as pretty as she looks, Jonathan.’

He watched Sarah spread her skirt over the piano stool. Her heavy braid fell forward as she bent over the keys and the light wool of her bodice stretched taut across the curve of her spine. ‘Sarah,’ he said. ‘Will you—?’

She turned to face him.

‘Will you—?’ he repeated. But his tongue seemed to get stuck in his embarrassed thoughts, so he gestured with his hands as he had years ago: would she please take a walk with him?

It was very cold, near to Christmas. Everything Jonathan could see from the front path of the Finster house was new to him. There hadn’t been any paved streets in Sweetbrier before. Even the trees were new; there’d not been a single tree in town when he was a boy, and yet the beech in Sarah’s front yard had a trunk thicker than a man’s waist. Fifteen years old at least, he thought, growing uneasy. They walked down the block.