"Only in motion is there life," Garnet said. "I will remember that."

She turned upon her lover a bright, melancholy smile, which so dazzled him that he looked away.

"I suppose," Garnet whispered, "we must leave each other now. I suppose-"

Mahalaleel rubbed against her legs, mewing in his throaty, guttural voice, but when Garnet stooped to pet him he eased away, and leapt onto the back of a chair, and then onto the mantel. A crystal vase wobbled and nearly fell, brushed by the cat's tail.

"I suppose we must," Gideon said.

His manner was subdued, almost somber. Did he want to weep, did he want to cry aloud, as she did? In recent months he had taken on the look of a mourner. But despite his thin, lined cheeks, and his shadowed eyes, and the almost cruel turn of his lips, he was still an extremely handsome man. With a pang of gratified alarm Garnet saw that she was doomed to carry this man's image with her, in the secrecy of her heart, for the rest of her life.

"If, at the very last moment," she said suddenly, her heart kicking in her chest, "if-even on the church steps- Or, after the ceremony, when we are about to drive away- If, you know, you made a sign to me- Only just raise your hand as if you were- As if it were accidental- Ah, even at the very last moment, Gideon, you know I would return to you!"

Now the restless cat leapt from the mantel to a table, and, in so doing, did knock the vase down; and caused it to break in a dozen large, wickedly curved pieces.

AS THE NEWLYWEDS were about to climb into the Bellefleur limousine, as they waved goodbye to the assembled well-wishers on the steps of Della's house, Gideon, standing at the rear, in his long heavy muskrat coat (for the March winds were ferociously cold), a matching fur hat atop his head, felt a sudden itching in his ear-and, without thinking, raised his hand to scratch it-began to raise his hand, to scratch it-and then froze. For he saw how the bride stared at him.

She was waving farewell giddily. Her pretty little white-gloved hands flew about, and her lovely hair was being blown by the wind, when, suddenly, seeing him about to make a gesture, she paused-paused and stared-stared at him with an expression in which hope, terror, and incredulity were mingled.

But Gideon had not scratched his ear. Wisely, prudently, he lowered his hand. He could tolerate the itching in his ear, he reasoned, despite its violence, until the limousine was well out of sight on the Falls road.

The Skin-Drum.

How strange! Whyever did he do it? Whyever did he sink into such cynicism, such despair? Imagine, the great Raphael Bellefleur willing himself to be, immediately following his death (which of course he had brought about by fairly starving himself, and taking not a one of the drugs prescribed for him by Wystan Sheeler), skinned, and his hide treated, and stretched across a Civil War cavalry drum that was to be, according to the terms of his will, kept "forever and at all times" on the first floor landing of the circular stairs leading up from the Great Hall of Bellefleur Manor! The man who had built the castle was to be preserved within it, in a matter of speaking, made into a drum, and the drum was to be (again, according to the will, though this clause was never obeyed) sounded each day to announce meals, the arrival of guests, and other special events. . . . What perversity, people said, laughing and shuddering. But then, you know, he wasn't even insane: he didn't have that excuse.

Properly played, the Skin-Drum of great-great-grandfather Raphael gave out a smart, brisk, magisterial tattoo which had the power to penetrate every corner of the castle. Hearing it (for sometimes the children played with it, risking severe punishment) the family shivered and stared off into space. That, they could not help but think, even those Bellefleurs who scorned superstitions, is old Raphael, living still.

THE SKIN-DRUM WAS often disappointing, at first. For when the children showed it to their cousins or friends they frequently withheld the most significant information about it: that it was made of the hide of a human being. So it presented itself as a Civil War drum, in quite good condition, with brass fittings, and faded red velvet ribbons, not strikingly different from drums the children might have seen elsewhere. Here, why don't you play it, one of the Bellefleur children might say, handing over the sticks-see what it sounds like.

One of the visitors (in fact it was Dave Cinquefoil, a few days before the mysterious death of the Doan boy) seized the drumsticks and, holding the drum awkwardly between his knees, as if he were riding a horse, hammered wildly away, giggling, and became so intoxicated with the sound (for it almost seemed, judging from the rat-tat-tat he was producing, that the boy had a natural talent for the drum) that he found it difficult to stop. Grinning, giggling, gasping for breath, he sat on the landing and drummed away with the sticks, his hands and arms moving so quickly they were hardly more than blurs, his face wet with perspiration and his eyes glittering, while the Bellefleur boys tried to stop him, appalled at the racket, for they hadn't, certainly, thought their cousin would have such an enthusiasm for the thing! From everywhere in the castle people appeared, holding their ears-even the shyest of the servants-even the youngest of the children-and still, and still, Dave hadn't wanted to stop-until finally Albert wrenched the sticks away from him, shouting, frightened, For Christ's sake that's enough!

Afterward, they told Dave that the drum was actually made out of the skin of their great-great-grandfather Raphael-who was of course Dave's great-great-grandfather as well. He had stared at them, his mouth slack, and smiled a queer loose smile, and said, finally, wiping his face, that he had guessed it: maybe he'd heard the story from his own parents, maybe he'd heard about it at the castle, but he didn't think so, he really thought he'd guessed it, while playing the thing. Not Raphael Bellefleur's exact identity, of course. But that the drum was fashioned out of a human being's hide, and that the person had been a Bellefleur. Yes, Dave said, laughing uneasily, I guessed it right away. He was the one who made me keep going.

IT WAS GENERALLY known that old Raphael's physician, the renowned Wystan Sheeler, had tried to dissuade him from the "drum fancy" (for so Dr. Sheeler called it, in an effort, perhaps, to undermine its power over the sick man's mind)-he had pointed out that such a whimsical, indeed capricious, action would have the inevitable effect of eclipsing the many significant things Raphael had done in his lifetime. He had, after all, built Bellefleur Manor. There was nothing quite like it in the Chautauquas-poor Hans Dietrich's castle had come nowhere near it in grandeur or ambition, and the medieval-Gothic monstrosity erected downriver by the brother of the "grain baron" Donoghue was, at best, a hunting and fishing lodge. Raphael had been, hadn't he, one of the founders of the Republican Party, at least in this part of the North, and he had built his hops empire up from nothing, meeting, in his prime, weekly payrolls involving more than three hundred workers. . . . Everyone knew that he had entertained royally: Supreme Court justices, among them the formidable Stephen Field, had been houseguests at the castle, and the brewery king Keeley, and the senators Kloepmaister and Fox, and the visiting Prince of Wales, and Secretary of State Seward, and Secretary of War Schofield, and the Attorneys General Speed, Stanbery, Hoar, and Taft, and Nathan Goff after he stepped down from his position as Secretary of the Navy, and of course there were briefer visits from Schuyler Colfax when he was Vice President, and Hamilton Fish just after the notorious Virginius episode, and even, for an afternoon, James Garfield when he was campaigning for the Presidency. Chester Arthur had been scheduled to spend a weekend at Bellefleur, but his wife's illness, at the last moment, detained him in Washington; Ulysses Grant had accepted an invitation but failed to appear; and of course there was the mysterious "Abraham Lincoln" who had sought refuge at Bellefleur, where he was to spend the rest of his days.

(Dr. Sheeler had never spoken with this individual, for Raphael kept him sequestered, for the most part, but he had caught several fairly direct glimpses of him-and it was true that the aged man resembled the late President. Gaunt, hollow-cheeked, with a melancholy visage, and an obviously intelligent face, and a beard not unlike Lincoln's: but he was much shorter than Lincoln had been, probably not more than five feet six, and so of course he wasn't Lincoln; could not possibly have been Lincoln; and why Raphael persisted with the folly, or truly believed that it was not folly, Dr. Sheeler could not determine. Perhaps, in his premature dotage, poor Bellefleur had so wanted to have been a significant political figure, or, failing that, an intimate acquaintance of a significant political figure, that he had invented an Abraham Lincoln of his own . . . ? On what was to be his deathbed Raphael "confided" in Dr. Sheeler: while President of the United States Lincoln had been near to collapse, near, even, to suicide, overcome with attacks of panic and guilt and horror arising from the thousands upon thousands of deaths the Union had suffered, and he had been quite sickened by the behavior and arrogance of Secretary of War Cameron, and of course by the meanness of Congress, and the turbulence of the country at large, even in those areas in which there was no active fighting, and (though he admitted it to no one at the time) he knew he had done wrong by imprisoning so many civilians in Indiana and elsewhere, simply because they had been suspected of proslavery sentiment, he knew he had behaved wickedly, and must be punished. So, aided by Raphael Bellefleur, whom he had recognized as a soulmate, the aggrieved man devised a scheme whereby an actor would be hired to "kill" him in a public place, and after his "death" an expertly constructed wax corpse would lie in state for thousands of mourners to view, and Lincoln himself, freed of his mortality, would retire to the paradise of the Chautauquas, as Raphael's permanent guest. All this came about flawlessly, Raphael insisted, and Lincoln spent his final years in near-seclusion on the estate, wandering in the woods, contemplating the lake and mountains, reading Plato, Plutarch, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Fielding, and Sterne, and playing, on long ice-locked winter evenings, chess and backgammon with his host, who was himself becoming a recluse. It wasn't long after Lincoln's "assassination," Raphael told Dr. Sheeler, that he halfway wished he might arrange for his own death in so bloodless and yet irrevocable a fashion.) But why did Raphael want to mock his own dignity, and desecrate his body, by insisting that his heirs have him skinned and made into a drum? Dr. Sheeler simply did not understand.

Raphael considered the question politely. In his final years he moved slowly, with a patrician studiedness; his every action, even so small and ostensibly casual an action as the lifting of a teacup, was measured and ironic, and imparted an air of tension to anyone who watched. If the tone of the first three-quarters of his life was zeal, the tone of the last quarter was irony. "Are you asking," he said finally, "why I have chosen a drum above other instruments . . . ? If so, I can only say that it was the first idea that flew into my mind. Because we have, you see, a cavalry drum on hand."

Dr. Sheeler chose to ignore his patient's exquisitely modulated sarcasm. He said, softly, "I meant, Mr. Bellefleur, why do you wish to mock yourself by mutilating your body in that fashion? I can think of no precedent for such an extraordinary act."

"Is it mockery?" the old man asked, knitting his brows. "I had thought, rather, it was a kind of immortality."

"Ah, immortality! Being stretched across a crude musical instrument, which your heirs will be instructed to play several times a day!-it's at the very least," Dr. Sheeler said, "a most unusual notion."

"I have provided for the conventional resting place, I've designed a handsome mausoleum, to be fashioned of white Italian marble, with graceful Corinthian columns, and charming androgynous angels with tinted marble eyes, and Anubis himself to stand guard," Raphael said, drawling out his words. "Unfortunately there is no one to share it with me. Mrs. Bellefleur, as you know, did away with herself in a most mysterious fashion; and my sons Rodman and Samuel have quite, quite vanished. And it isn't likely, I suspect, that they will be found-even after my death I doubt that they will step forward. Lamentations is my only heir, and you see what he has become."

"He's a steadfast, generous young man."

"He's a fool. And his wife Elvira: you're aware, of course, that she has returned to her parents' home, temporarily, as she insists, in order to have her baby there, claiming that the atmosphere of the manor is disturbing . . . ? I doubt that that headstrong young woman will return here while I am still living."

"She loves you, but it's quite possible that she does find the atmosphere disturbing. This new notion of yours-"

"Loves me!" Raphael said contemptuously. "Of course she doesn't love me. Nor does my son. Nor do I especially want them to. It's on account of that, you see, that my wishes must be carried out to the letter."

"That-?" Dr. Sheeler asked, baffled.

"That," Raphael said with finality.

AFTER YEARS OF estrangement Dr. Sheeler was summoned back to Bellefleur, to treat Raphael (who had aged considerably since his third defeat at the polls) for "sluggish circulation," sleeplessness, and chronic depression. It was clear to Dr. Sheeler that his patient had given up on life, even as he made languid, drawling requests for the proper medicines to treat his condition. He often wandered about the walled garden in the rain, or tramped slowly along the lake shore, leaning heavily on his cane, his pince-nez, secured by an elastic band, swinging free of his face. He no longer troubled to change his linen often, or even to shave; his eyebrows had become grizzled; he muttered aloud to himself, gnashing his teeth, reliving old battles.

Three times he had run for the office of governor, and three times he had lost! And the third defeat had been the most humiliating. So many thousands of dollars wasted . . . so much of his spirit, his strength, his idealism. . . . There had been, of course, savage editorials against him. There had been clownish cartoons, vile caricatures. Libelous "exposes" by journalist hacks: HOGS TREATED BETTER THAN BELLEFLEUR HOPS PICKERS. And: BELLEFLEUR LABORERS DYING LIKE FLIES. Midway in his campaign he had rushed home to initiate a clean-up of the barracks, which were somewhat unclean, but it was too late, the influenza was already raging; and then the summer was so unusually wet; and the following summer as well, when he couldn't get enough pickers to work in the fields, and the hops ripened prematurely and began to rot. . . . Thousands upon thousands of dollars, rotting. The green jungles, acres of green, vines snaking from left to right around the supporting poles, a sea of leafy green, lush and overlush, rotting in the moist sunlight. And how everyone had rejoiced, knowing he was broken.

Hayes Whittier too had betrayed him. Hayes's tubercular son had died, finally-the camp on Lake Noir had not saved him-but it wasn't on account of the son's death that Hayes had turned against him, and may even (stories differed, of course) have spoken publicly against him, during the last days of his doomed campaign. Hayes had been in love with Violet. Or had behaved as if he were. Struck, as he called it, by something "haunted" in her face. (Her morbid attachment to that halfwitted Hungarian carpenter whose name Raphael had forgotten, perhaps!) It had seemed to Raphael that Hayes's sentimental passion for Violet had increased as his son's strength ebbed. He gazed upon her with moony vacant eyes. He was eager to accompany her to receptions and dinners and even, upon occasion, to a lavish society funeral in Vanderpoel-his lovesick manner rather comically at odds with his portly bulk and his mussed muttonchop whiskers and his formidable wife (the granite-bosomed Hortense Frier, the bishop's daughter), and his reputation as one of the shrewdest and most audacious leaders of the Republican Party. That he had betrayed other men, out of necessity, as he claimed, and driven at least one of them (Hugh Boutwell, after his bid for senator) to a premature grave, had seemed to Raphael proof of the man's authority: he had never dreamt Hayes might turn against him.

Take me with you to Washington, Violet had begged, on that crucial April morning (the day before, as Raphael rather irrelevantly recalled, Palm Sunday), I can't bear to stay at Bellefleur while you're gone, and Raphael, vexed at his wife's sudden foolishness, said irritably, My dear, I am only going to be absent for two days! The ride in the carriage would exhaust you, and then we would be returning immediately-it isn't, you must know, a pleasure jaunt. Then tell our houseguests to postpone their visit, Violet said. Certainly not, Raphael said, staring at her through his pince-nez, can I have heard you correctly? Tell our houseguests-! But, said Violet, the Whittiers are so-so- Both Whittiers, said Raphael enigmatically, you are speaking of-? She had paced about the room like an actress signaling distraction, she had even managed to pull strands of her hair loose, and seemed to her husband willful and not at all charming: for she would misunderstand his very faith, his husband's inviolable faith, in her. That she might even think that he might even think her capable of succumbing to Hayes Whittier's importunate attentions-! It was foul, it was unspeakable. Raphael seized her lavender parasol, that silly beribboned French thing, and kicked it across the room. Madame, he cried in a high wounded voice, you defile the very air of our home, with the sort of sentiments I cannot help but intuit, and reject with all that is in me!

Much later, the Washington trip not only completed but its meager fruits forgotten, when Raphael had occasion to dine with Hayes and several other gentlemen in Manhattan, he noted Hayes's palpable coolness, his forced "good manners," and deduced-with relief, with gratification-that his husbandly faith in Violet's virtue had not been misplaced: certainly she had never been that big-bellied bewhiskered creature's mistress, even for a night: the very idea was obscene. And how is Mrs. Bellefleur, Hayes asked over brandy and cigars, rather belatedly, not quite meeting Raphael's eye, and Raphael said curtly, Violet is well.

"PERHAPS YOU WANT to defile yourself," Wystan Sheeler said cautiously, "because you feel, without quite articulating it, guilt over your wife's-"

"Not at all," Raphael said. "Rather, it is she who must feel guilt, and shame as well. For didn't she betray me?-didn't she betray her wedding vows, by taking her own life so wantonly?"

"The guilt of which I speak," Dr. Sheeler said, "is not a conscious guilt. It is not an examined guilt. It is, instead-"

"She is ashamed, like the others," Raphael said in a flat weary voice.

"Such guilt is, instead-"

Raphael began to laugh suddenly. Propped up against pillows, sweating out a severe attack of the flu that had come upon him, as nearly as his physician could deduce, as a consequence of an unwise midnight walk along the lakeshore, in a driving rain, the aging man looked both abstracted and painfully knowing. He screwed up one side of his face and all but winked at the alarmed Dr. Sheeler. "Forgive me," he said, gasping for breath, "but I was forced to think of-of-my grandfather Jean-Pierre-of whom, as you know, I rarely think-for I never knew him, he was dead before my birth-long dead-and if he had not died, he and the others, those unhappy others, I would not have been born, and so-! And so-there are inevitably things of which one does not think if one wishes to remain sane-until such time as-as they are thrust into the open-But I was saying-I seem to have lost the thread of what I was saying-"

Dr. Sheeler lay his hand against the fevered man's forehead, and attempted to calm him. "We were speaking only of a theoretical matter," Dr. Sheeler said gently, "and perhaps this is not the time. . . ."

"Guilt," Raphael said, thrusting his physician's hand away, "my wife's or mine, or whatever you are proposing. Guilt and shame and-and all the rest. And suddenly I found myself thinking of one of the old crook's schemes: the selling of 'elk' manure over in the Eden Valley. Special Arctic manure, the highest quality of manure, twenty-five wagons of it, I seem to recall, sold at $75 a wagonload to some idiot farmers . . . ! And they bought it, they bought it," Raphael said, beginning to laugh again, wheezing with laughter. Tears spilled from his narrow stone-colored eyes. "Elk manure. The old crazy crook. No wonder he died as he did, as he had to. . . . And Louis and . . . and the others. . . . For if they hadn't died I would not have seen the light of day: I and Fredericka and Arthur. And so. And so, Dr. Sheeler, you see," he said, laughing so that his caved-in chest began to heave, "there is, at the bottom, elk manure. Your theories-my guilt-hers-theirs-anyone's: elk manure. The very finest high-grade Arctic nitrogen-rich elk manure."

Dr. Sheeler drew back from the sick man's bed, and stared rather coldly at him. After a long pause, during which Raphael continued to laugh with an abandon ill-fitting his condition, and his stature, the good physician said, "Mr. Bellefleur, I fail to understand the basis of your mirth."

But Raphael, dying, laughed all the harder.

AND SO THE famous Raphael Bellefleur did die, for it was, evidently, one of the grimmest aspects of the Bellefleur Curse that one had to die . . . whether in old age or in youth, whether willingly and eagerly, or with revulsion: no escaping it, one simply had to die.

In sickbeds or in the beds of strangers. In the lake, that eerie dark-hued lake; or on horseback; or in flaming blazing "accidents"; or as a consequence of a simple household misstep-slipping down the stairs of the Great Hall, for instance, or being infected by a cat's scratch. Bellefleurs tend to die interesting deaths, Gideon once observed, many years before his death; but his observation was not necessarily accurate.

Raphael's, for instance, was not a particularly interesting death. Heart failure as a consequence of severe influenza: and then of course he was simply an old man: prematurely aged. He died, not in his comfortable canopied bed, but on the floor of Violet's drawing room, which had been preserved exactly as she had left it on the night of her suicide. (How the sickly old man had dragged himself there no one could guess. He had seemed, the day before, totally without strength.) He died in Violet's room very late one June night and was found by a servant the next morning, face down on the carpet, beside the clavichord. The green brocaded cover had been pulled off the bench, but the keyboard remained closed.

Of course he was mourned throughout the state, and even his old enemies, and the numerous men who had mocked and ridiculed him behind his back, were appalled at his passing. Raphael Bellefleur, who had built that monstrous castle, dead-! Dead like anyone else!

The aged Hayes Whittier, confined to a wheelchair in his Georgetown mansion, was said to have burst into tears when the news was told him.

"It's the end of our great era," he said. "America will never see anything quite like it again." (Though Whittier's Memoirs, published posthumously, were disappointingly circumspect about his private life, even as they were boldly frank about his public life, it is possible to deduce from the tone of melancholy resignation with which he spoke of "the beautiful Englishwoman" with her "haunted" face who was mistress of Bellefleur Manor that he had never been Violet's lover.) So the great man died, he who had been, in his prime, many times a millionaire: and his single heir Lamentations of Jeremiah had not the audacity to disobey the terms of his will. The body was skinned, and the skin treated, and stretched across the frame of a cavalry drum, to be kept for many decades in its appointed place on the first-floor landing of the Great Hall. The drum was judged a fairly handsome instrument, as such things go. It had not, for instance, the graceful beauty of Violet's clavichord-but it was attractive in its own way.

ONLY A VERY few times was the Skin-Drum used as Raphael had wished, played, upon significant occasions (the birth of Jean-Pierre II, the stroke of midnight of New Year's Eve of 1900, the anniversary of Raphael's death), by a uniformed servant, a sort of butler-handyman, who had been, in the Civil War, a drummer boy. After this servant's departure from the castle Jeremiah himself attempted the task, his teeth chattering, the sticks slipping repeatedly from his numbed fingers; and that was it. No one wanted to play the Skin-Drum, still less did anyone want to hear it. For it gave out an astonishingly penetrating sound not easily forgotten.

Instead, as Raphael could not have foreseen, the Skin-Drum became invisible.

Of course it was there on the landing, it was always there, but no one saw it, even the servant girl who routinely dusted it did not see it, and only when Leah prepared the castle for the celebration of great-grandmother Elvira's hundredth birthday did anyone realize what it was: and then, suddenly, it was looked upon with horror, disgust, and embarrassment: and of course someone (quite possibly Leah) hauled it away for "safekeeping."

And in a closet, or in the attic, or in the darkest regions of the cellar, the Skin-Drum was to remain, for as long as Bellefleur Manor stood.

The Traitorous Child.

Now in that final summer there began, at first in secret and then quite openly, a contest between Germaine's mother and father: over her, for her, with her as the prize.

Which of us do you love? Leah whispered, gripping her tight by the shoulders. You must choose! Choose.

And Gideon, in secret, squatting down before her, gripping her too (though less painfully) by the shoulders: Would you like to come flying with me, Germaine, sometime soon? In one of the smaller planes? In one of the Cubs? You would love it, you wouldn't be at all frightened. Just you and your daddy, for an hour, to Mount Blanc and back, so you could see all the rivers and lakes and this house, even, from the sky, and nobody here would ever know-!

THE CONTEST WAS invisible. Yet you could feel it. A teeter-totter's motion: first one side and then the other and then the other again, and then the other. For all that one had the other demanded. And then again the other demanded. And then again . . .

Which was very strange, like a dream that wouldn't end but went on rumbling and rolling no matter how you tried to wake up. Which was very ugly. And made the little girl (who was, in June of that year, exactly three years and ten months old) run away and hide in the long narrow dark closet in the nursery, where old cast-off clothes and toys were kept; or down at the bottom of the garden, behind the new hedgerow.

She stuck her fingers in her mouth: first one, then two, then three. She learned to be cautious. For once, on the terrace, pretending to read the newspaper over her mother's shoulder, she did begin to read out loud, shouting and giggling, suddenly very excited, and Leah turned to her in astonishment-astonishment not altogether pleased.

My God, Leah exclaimed, you know how to read. . . . You know how to read.

Germaine backed away, bumping into one of the wrought-iron chairs in her excitement. Her face had gone very warm.

But who taught you? Leah asked.

Germaine, sticking a finger in her mouth, did not reply.

Someone must have taught you, Leah said. Was it Uncle Hiram? Was it Lissa? Vida? Raphael? Was it your father?

Germaine shook her head, suddenly mute. She stood, stubborn and shy, with two fingers in her mouth, her head bowed, peering at amazed half-angry Leah, with nothing at all to say for herself.

You didn't teach yourself, did you, Leah said, rummaging through Bromwell's old books? All those old books in the nursery? You couldn't have taught yourself.

Germaine blinked, watching her mother closely.

Or did I teach you, without knowing it? These mornings on the terrace, going through the newspapers . . . Leah contemplated the little girl, perplexed. She fumbled for her cigarillos and shook one out onto her palm: though smoking made her cough, and she had vowed to give it up soon. Why don't you answer, why do you look so guilty, Leah asked. It wasn't your father, was it? As if he'd have the time!

So she learned to be cautious.

SKIN AND BONES, they call him, Leah whispered. The women. The girls he chases. Skin and Bones. And some of them, the younger girls, even call him Old Skin and Bones. Think of it-! Gideon Bellefleur who thinks so highly of himself!

Early on the day of Morna's wedding, when everyone had been up since dawn, and the house was in a turmoil. When Leah sent one of the maids away, in tears, because the clumsy girl couldn't make Leah's chignon look the way it was supposed to look.

She couldn't decide whether Germaine should wear a yellow satin frock with a bow at the collar (which would match her own yellow satin gown), or a dotted-swiss with long white ribbons. She couldn't decide whether Germaine's corkscrew curls should be left as they were, hanging down the poor child's back (for the little girl, of course, detested those curls), or brushed out quickly, and her hair swept up in imitation of her mother's, fastened with gold barrettes, a sprig of lily of the valley pinned in place.

Do you know-they laugh at him behind his back, and call him Old Skin and Bones! Leah said. But of course you mustn't tell anyone. You mustn't even ask me about it. I suppose I shouldn't have told you-you will have so debased-disappointed-so sad a memory of your high-and-mighty father- And at breakfast, at their hurried breakfast, Leah had leaned over to kiss Germaine, but really to whisper in her ear (almost within Gideon's hearing), Old Skin and Bones!

BUT WHY WAS that?

Because he was so thin now.

And why was he so thin?

The automobile accident, the concussion, the quarrels, not eating right, drinking too much, staying away for so long, and now this business, this crazy selfish business, of flying planes. . . . And I wouldn't be surprised (so people whispered) if there was another woman involved. Up there in Invemere. Another, another, another woman.

Old Skin and Bones: with his yellowish hawkish hollowed-out face: so restless most of the time he couldn't sit still, couldn't even sit down, because his mind was taxiing down the runway and lifting into the sky, always lifting, lifting into the sky, and his heart leapt at the thought of it, pursuing the Hawker Tempest, following it to its secret destination somewhere north of Lake Tear-of-the-Cloud. Restless most of the time, and sleepless too, so that a quart of bourbon a day wasn't unusual, simply so that he could sleep after the excitement of the sky; but then again, then again, there were days when he was too drained of spirit even to rise from bed and dress himself, and at eleven or eleven-thirty his mother would rap timidly on his door, saying Gideon? Gideon? Are you all right? This is Cornelia, are you all right?

"WHAT I OBJECT to," Gideon said, on their way to Morna's wedding, seated, the three of them, in the back seat of the smaller Rolls limousine, with the glass partition firmly shut, "what I particularly object to is your obsessiveness. Your morbid obsessiveness with the child."

"What on earth are you saying-!" Leah laughed.

"Your interest in her."

"She's only a three-year-old, she needs her mother, it isn't uncommon for mothers and daughters to be inseparable," Leah said, looking out the window. "And you, after all, have no time for her."

"You weren't like this with Christabel."

"Who? Ah, Christabel! But she and Bromwell had each other, it was an entirely different thing," Leah said quickly. "They were twins, and-and-it seems so long ago."

"You fawn over her and bully her," Gideon said, "as you did this morning at breakfast, and according to my parents you do constantly, never letting her out of your sight. As if she were much younger. As if she were a baby."

"She's only three years old! Aren't you, sweetheart?"

Germaine, seated between her parents, pretended to be very interested in her coloring book. With purple, orange, green, and scarlet crayons she was coloring in a rainbow of her own design, which curved through the not-very-interesting drawing of a farmhouse and barn she was meant to color. In the yellow satin frock with the big bow at the collar, and her smart new patent-leather shoes, she was somewhat uncomfortable, but forced herself to sit still; for otherwise Leah would scold.

"She's almost four. She's very mature for her age," Gideon said. "She isn't a baby."

"But you know nothing about children, do you," Leah said. "You!"

"I am not thinking of myself," Gideon said evenly, "I am thinking only of her."

"You think of no one except yourself."