So they were silent, eating, and this time Winnie licked the syrup from her fingers without pausing to think about it first. Her fears at last night’s supper seemed silly to her now. Perhaps they were crazy, but they weren’t criminals. She loved them. They belonged to her.

Tuck said, “How’d you sleep, child?”

And she answered, “Just fine,” and wished, for a fleeting moment, that she could stay with them forever in that sunny, untidy little house by the pond. Grow up with them and perhaps, if it was true about the spring—then perhaps, when she was seventeen…She glanced at Jesse, where he sat on the floor, his curly head bent over his plate. Then she looked at Miles. And then her eyes went to Tuck and lingered on his sad, creased face. It occurred to her that he was the dearest of them all, though she couldn’t have explained why she felt that way.

However, there wasn’t time to wonder, for at that moment someone knocked at the door.

It was such an alien sound, so sudden and surprising, that Mae dropped her fork, and everyone looked up, startled. “Who’s that?” said Tuck.

“I can’t imagine,” whispered Mae. “We ain’t never had callers in all the years we been here.”

The knock came again.

“I’ll go, Ma,” said Miles.

“No, stay where you are,” she said. “I’ll go.” She put her plate down carefully on the floor and stood up, straightening her skirts. Then she went to the kitchen and opened the door.

Winnie recognized the voice at once. It was a rich and pleasant voice. The man in the yellow suit. And he was saying, “Good morning, Mrs. Tuck. It is Mrs. Tuck, isn’t it. May I come in?”

19

The man in the yellow suit came into the sunlit parlor. He stood for a moment, looking around at them all, Mae and Miles and Jesse and Tuck, and Winnie, too. His face was without expression, but there was something unpleasant behind it that Winnie sensed at once, something that made her instantly suspicious. And yet his voice was mild when he said, “You’re safe now, Winifred. I’ve come to take you home.”

“We was going to bring her back directly, ourself,” said Tuck, standing up slowly. “She ain’t been in no danger.”

“You’re Mr. Tuck, I suppose,” said the man in the yellow suit.

“I am,” said Tuck formally, his back straighter than usual.

“Well, you may as well sit down again. You, too, Mrs. Tuck. I have a great deal to say and very little time for saying it.”

Mae sat down on the edge of the rocker, and Tuck sat, too, but his eyes were narrowed.

Jesse said, uneasily, “Who in tarnation do you think you—”

But Tuck interrupted. “Hush, boy. Let him speak his piece.”