In the nursery were things Garth had played with as a child, and outgrown-the rocking horses, the merry-go-round, the stuffed animals-though he could only dimly remember them, and their very sight filled him with an inexplicable inchoate anger. He watched the strange child move among them, as silent as he, lifting and setting down toys as if she too were recognizing them, but did not quite know what to do with them. Several of the girls-Christabel and Vida and of course Yolande, who could not resist anything stray and mysterious-played with Little Goldie, making friends by degrees, helping her with her lessons now that Bromwell was banished from the nursery (and it was the case, rather oddly, that Gideon took Garth's side in the outburst, and would have walloped Bromwell's behind if the child hadn't burst into tears), and with her ABC sampler, which she was doing in rich purples, golds, and greens, exactly like the old, tattered sampler on the wall, framed and behind glass, that had once been done by someone named Arlette Bellefleur-ABC's, numerals up to ten, and the statement I AM ARLETTE BELLEFLEUR BORN 1811-though of course the sampler on the wall was badly faded. No one thought it puzzling that Garth, who was always out of doors, even in bad weather, lingered about the nursery with the girls, quick to offer to repair their dollhouse (which must have been, Yolande said, one hundred years old, and termite-ridden) when the swinging wall fell off its hinges, and to help them move furniture about (they aped the restless Leah who liked nothing so much as to spend a rainy afternoon ordering the servants to rearrange the furniture, and struggling impatiently with pieces herself)-the teetering whatnot shelf made of empty spools of thread, painted Chinese red, and filled with dolls' china and tiny glass birds and animals and eggs, which Garth carried without effort, and in a wonderfully graceful way, so that nothing toppled off and broke; the child-sized horsehair sofa that was a replica of one of the parlor sofas; the heavy music box, which must have been three feet deep and five feet long, the size of a child's casket, said to have been made in Switzerland though it was equipped with American rolls. When Yolande thanked him spiritedly, as if she were proud-especially before Little Goldie-of how considerate her older brother could be, Garth blushed and could not think of anything to say. He knew only that the strange little girl with the solemn freckled face and the waist-long white-blond hair was staring at him intently.

So he fled the nursery, and spent a week or so outdoors-working on the farm, accompanying Ewan and Hiram on a business trip to the Falls. And then he reappeared one stormy afternoon when the temperature dropped thirty degrees in an hour, and asked if they wouldn't like him to build a fire in the little fireplace-? By this time Goldie was clearly more at home, and seemed happy to see him. She laughed often, though she would not always explain her merriment; she hugged Yolande when Yolande guided her clumsy hands so that she could thread an especially fine needle; she offered Garth a doll's cup of the rank catnip tea the girls had brewed. One of the women had taken the time to set her hair in ringlets, and she looked as sweet, as demure, as improbably pious as the pencil drawings on the nursery walls of numerous Bellefleurs as children (these insipid drawings, done by more than one artist, portrayed Raoul, Emmanuel, Ewan, Gideon, and even Noel, Matilde, Jean-Pierre II, Della, and Hiram, and one or two unidentified children, in identical poses: their hands clasped in prayer, their eyes cast beseechingly heavenward); but even then Garth did not comprehend how he loved her.

He cranked the music box for the girls, and willingly changed the heavy copper rolls, though it embarrassed him to be forced to admit-as Bromwell would not have been forced-that he hadn't any idea of how the mechanism worked. "It just goes like this, this thing in here," he said, growing warm as Little Goldie along with Christabel and Yolande pressed near. The music box hadn't been one of the pastimes Garth had cared for, when he had slept in the nursery, and even now he found its smooth gleaming oak sides and its fussy etched-glass lid discomforting. It might so easily break down and how on earth would he repair it?

One of the rolls gave out, at various speeds, English minuets and rondos and dainty tinkling tunes, another bellowed hymns accompanied by a wheezing organ, still another-Garth's favorite-sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "General Harrison's Grand March" and the "St. Louis Light Guard Polka and Schottisch." Garth grew to like the music, or at any rate to like Little Goldie's solemn, awed interest in it, and though the other girls rapidly lost interest and drifted away, and Yolande began to be absent from the nursery for days at a time, Garth never grew tired of turning the brass crank. On their honeymoon, in fact on their wedding night, the "St. Louis Light Guard Polka and Schottisch" was to attain a wildly ecstatic beauty.

Because he had never been in love before Garth had no idea, nor might anyone have thought to explain to him (for he was naturally moody, and often turned away with a snarl when approached) why he was stricken with insomnia, why he lost his appetite, why he wanted only to be by himself-in the cemetery, up at Bloody Run, riding his horse along Mink Creek-or why, perversely, he wanted never to be alone, but with Little Goldie. He bloodied his cousin Louis's lip when Louis inadvertently bumped into him, and then again he ran out barefoot in the rain, late one night, to waylay his uncle Hiram who, sleepwalking, had managed to open the two or three doors locked for his protection, and who was stumbling open-eyed, his arms feebly extended, in the direction of the Bellefleurs' dock on Lake Noir: and Garth did this with a peculiar abashed courtesy. (He had, in the past, been sent after Hiram, and had never been able to resist grabbing the pompous old fool's arm roughly, and shaking him awake, though he was instructed not to do so.) He turned on Mahalaleel when Mahalaleel leapt up from nowhere onto the wrought-iron table in the garden where some of the family was lunching, and nearly made off with a turkey drumstick, though the rash action resulted in a badly lacerated forearm, and everyone chided him: he shouldn't have tried to hurt Mahalaleel, he should only have tried to retrieve the drumstick. And then again he was patient with Vida, and told the boys not to follow Raphael out to his pond but to leave him alone, what did it matter, what the hell did it matter, if Raphael wanted to be by himself every day? His blood pounded with a sudden impulsive fury, and then subsided; and he felt sometimes like weeping; and he did suffer from insomnia for the first time in his life. (Previously Garth had been certain that people who claimed to lie awake all night were lying. They must be lying, for how on earth did they keep their eyelids from closing as his did, within seconds after he lay his head on the pillow?) One night, sleepless, he wandered the second-floor corridor in the direction of the nursery, and happened to see great-aunt Veronica gliding along, noiselessly, ahead of him, her feet evidently bare, and very pale, her long thick gunmetal-gray hair loose on her shoulders, her dark robe (for she wore mourning, like Della, even at night) billowing about her-and he thought it odd that Veronica should pause at the nursery door, and stand with her head inclined to it for several long seconds, and then open the door and step inside. Odd, and disturbing, though he couldn't have said precisely why-for wasn't it the prerogative, even the duty, of the women in the house to check on the younger children from time to time? But he followed Veronica into the darkened nursery and saw, by moonlight, how she bent over the sleeping Little Goldie, and how stiff her back went when she heard or sensed his presence. She turned to him readily, however, as if not very surprised, and, her forefinger to her lips, pushed him back out into the candlelit corridor, and said, her eyes nearly shut as if she were winking: "What a charming little sister Ewan and Gideon brought home for you. . . . She's very attractive, isn't she?"

But it was only after several distressing weeks, at dusk of a blustery August day, when, in Little Goldie's presence, he first began to comprehend the nature of his affliction. Vida and Christabel and Morna and Little Goldie had served him "tea" in the nursery, using miniature cups and saucers, and everyone was sillier than usual because it wasn't tea they sipped but sweet cream sherry one of the girls had stolen from downstairs (Bellefleur children, throughout the generations, always stole sweet sherries and liqueurs from downstairs, and were rarely caught, even by adults who had done the same thing as children in the same house), when they began to giggle at the pencil drawings on the walls which looked, in Christabel's reiterated phrase, like horses' asses. There was Ewan as a little boy! So funny, rolling his eyes upward! And grandfather Noel of all people! And Hiram, hardly more than a baby! Oh, why were their lips so dark, as if they were wearing lipstick, and why did the girls have such grotesque hairdos! And their eyes shone like angels' eyes. The most angelic, the most alarmingly beautiful, of the portraits was that of Garth's uncle Gideon, who must have been about Little Goldie's age at the time of the drawing. Christabel giggled and giggled at it, until her cheeks were wet with tears. "Just look at Daddy! Just look at Daddy!" she cried. But Little Goldie, suddenly sober, ran to the wall, and stood on her tiptoes to examine the portrait. Garth saw how her expression changed; how raptly she stared up at the striking child inside the ornate gold frame. Little Goldie mumbled something that sounded like, "That's him, is it," and Garth's insides contracted violently with a poison he knew at once-though how could he have known, being so inexperienced?-was jealousy. He gripped the tiny teacup so hard its handle shattered.

The Hound.

In a full-bodiced white blouse and a long cornflower-blue cotton skirt, wearing her new straw hat with the wide pink velvet ribbon that fell in two streamers down her back, Yolande Bellefleur left the graveled path of the park and, seeing that no one watched, climbed over a split-rail fence with no more than two quick deft movements that hardly showed the white of her petticoats. . . . There was no one to observe the fact that she was slipping off into the forbidden woods north of the cemetery, alone; there was no one to see how becomingly the pink streamers fell against her curly wheat-colored hair. One moment she was on the path, walking without haste: the next moment she had disappeared into the stand of hemlock and mountain maples that bounded the park at this end.

She was fifteen years old and very pretty and she was on her way-ah, no one would have guessed!-though why on an ordinary weekday morning would she be wearing so fetching an outfit, and her brand-new (it was hardly a week old) straw hat rather than her old straw hat?-on her way-so she mouthed the words, shivering-to meet her lover. Yolande Bellefleur was on her way to meet her lover.

The woods, the forbidden woods! The forbidden Bellefleur woods!

Sunless and preternaturally silent and yet enchantingly beautiful: or was it simply the peace of the forest that was so beautiful? Those who strolled idly through the woods found themselves saying less and less, for words, in this dark still inhuman place, rang hollow; tasted suddenly meager on the tongue; lost their meaning. Peace, tranquillity, silence, the soft bed of pine needles always underfoot, springy, spongy, seductive, lulling. . . . One lowered his voice in this place, and soon stopped talking altogether. For what value had mere words, here?

Still, she shaped her words aloud, though shyly (for the forest had already begun to intimidate her): "Yolande Bellefleur is on her way to meet her lover. . . ."

Nine-thirty in the morning. A fresh clear windless day. She had wakened early, stirred by the memory of Saturday's prolonged delirium: the Steadman wedding upriver at the Steadman estate, Irma Steadman married at the age of seventeen, Yolande one of eight bridesmaids. . . . Irma Steadman, her friend, standing there beside her bridegroom, in that long full gown with its layers of Spanish lace, and the veil that had been her grandmother's, her small sweet face radiant (for there was no other word); the young man beside her in his bridegroom's outfit, with the silk-embroidered buttonholes and the ruffled cuffs and the sprig of orange blossom in his lapel, and the smart gleaming patent leather shoes. . . . Yolande's gown was made of moire silk, buttercup yellow, and her shoes matched the bride's: made of fine white kid with small high heels and tiny pearl buttons. Ah, she had loved it. Loved them. Loved the entire day.

Her side began to ache, from walking so fast, she was out of breath and the straw hat had been knocked askew. How deep the woods were, how eerily beautiful. . . . Children might play at the edge of the forest but girls Yolande's age were cautioned not to walk in it, not even in twos or threes, and certainly not alone. If Lily knew-! If grandmother Cornelia knew-! "Oh, for God's sake what do you think will happen to me," Yolande snorted, "do you think I'll be raped, for God's sake!" Lily stared at her as if she'd never heard anything so astonishing. She missed the opportunity, even, to be angry: just stood there staring at her brash arrogant daughter. "Well, Mother, I mean . . . I mean, for God's sake," Yolande murmured weakly. "You know very well that nothing can happen to me in our own woods."

Tales of girls alone in the forest many years ago: someone named Hepatica, a distant aunt or cousin, who had walked alone in this very woods, evidently, and had met . . . or been confronted by . . . by whom, by what? Yolande did not recall. There were hints that something had happened or almost happened to aunt Veronica, long ago (but it would have to be long ago, Yolande giggled, for poor thick-waisted homely aunt Veronica was hardly the type of woman to drive men into a frenzy of lust), and something had almost happened to Aveline as well. . . . Cautionary tales, frankly silly tales that Yolande only pretended to listen to: she knew very well how foolish the older women were being. Yolande this, Yolande that. Yolande, don't run, you must learn to walk like a lady, and when entering a room you should . . . you should not . . . you should. . . . Never cross your knees, don't cross your arms either, you don't want to flatten your bosom but you certainly don't want to make it prominent by crossing your arms beneath. . . . Are you listening? Where is your mind?

Yolande!

A white-and-brown hare bounded away in terror so extreme she halfway thought it must be playful or mocking. Why run from her, what possible harm might she do? "Oh, you silly bunny! Silly dear darling bunny. . . ." There were deer in the Bellefleur woods, hidden from sight; and owls and foxes and raccoons and pheasants; there might be bears-though probably not so close to the house; there might be (and here Yolande swallowed hard, for she hadn't thought of this earlier, she never thought of such ugly distressing things) snakes . . . long thick squirming hideous snakes. . . . (Hadn't Garth brought home, the summer before, a twelve-footer?-draped about his neck, its head bashed in, is warm glinting coral-brown skin looking supple as if it still breathed?) But snakes, she knew, felt the vibrations of footsteps, and fled . . . even the poisonous snakes fled . . . most of the time. Snakes do not want to confront human beings, it was said.

Once there had been panthers and wolves in this very forest, but they had been killed off, or driven out. From time to time the Noir Vulture appeared, a bold vicious predator that could lift creatures the size of foxes and fawns into the air, and tear them apart as it flew, ripping and stabbing with its long thin beak: but the Noir Vulture was nearly extinct, and Yolande had certainly never caught a glimpse of one; even her brothers had never seen one. "Oh, very likely there isn't such a thing," Yolande murmured aloud, "very likely they've just made it up to scare us. . . ."

Another panicked crashing through the underbrush. This was a somewhat larger creature, and Yolande's heart leapt as if it wanted to burst free of her body. Ah-what a commotion! But there was nothing to fear. A pity that the forest creatures lived in such terror, bounding away from Yolande Bellefleur in her pretty blue skirt and her smart straw hat, as if they imagined she was a hunter. . . . Her heart was still pounding. It shared in the creature's frenzied panic, and wanted to fly free of her ribs and escape into the forest.

Yolande stood motionless, until the attack of panic subsided. Overhead was a small patch of sky, straight overhead, no more than a few inches in circumference: it looked like a faint blue ball poised on the topmost branches of the pines. "Well-if it rains I won't get wet," Yolande said aloud. "The rain couldn't penetrate all that."

She came upon a glade of long, bent-over grass, where coarse chicory grew, and another blue flower she couldn't resist picking and entwining in the band of her hat-were they dayflowers?-and now she looked very pert and pretty indeed; and where was her lover?

The glade would have been, she saw, an appropriate meeting place.

There was no one to observe her kicking off her shoes, and dancing three steps in one direction, and three steps in another. . . . And she began to sing, to hum, even to whistle, snapping her fingers, even lifting her skirts for a little impish kick that showed her petticoats. In the city last June she'd seen a music hall show, she'd marveled at the dancers' white satin outfits, their high-piled black hair that gleamed like tar, their garishly made-up faces, their-but what was it!-their style. One or two of the girls had seemed not much older than Yolande herself. She might have sneaked backstage, she might have knocked at a dressing-room door to inquire timidly how one became a dancer or a singer . . . ? Or an actress . . . ?

A pity her lover was late. A pity he couldn't hear Yolande singing the rousing "When the Boys Come Home" with which the music hall program had ended: the girls high-stepping, in white boots, with red-white-and-blue streamers across their breasts, and high fur hats that might have been made of ermine.

Then she broke off, since she'd forgotten the words. It was such an old song. What did she want with an old song. She took off her hat and sailed it onto the grass and, shaking her hair vigorously, gave her lips that poutish smile Aunt Leah used so frequently, while her eyes-but ah! her eyes were so much more powerful than Yolande's-widened mischievously. Even when she sang to the darling new baby, even then her face was so, so . . . but Yolande's face was narrower, smaller . . . her lips weren't so full . . . perhaps she only made herself ridiculous, imitating her aunt? And then she did not even like Leah. Decidedly, she did not like Leah. She wanted to snatch that baby out of Leah's arms and sing to it in her own voice, in her own way, Sleep, baby, sleep, Thy father watches the sheep, Thy mother shakes the dreamland tree, And down falls a little dream on thee. . . .

Her voice was husky, wispy, melancholy. She wondered-could it be trained? The lighthearted dancing-about songs called forth a high girlish voice, and made her want to dance energetically about; but the lullaby called forth a different voice. Which was nicer, Yolande wondered; which would her lover prefer. . . . ?

She sang the lullaby again, rocking an imaginary baby in her arms. A single tear rolled down her cheek. Her blue eyes glittered and her lips trembled with an emotion she could not disguise; but there was no one to observe.

Or was there someone nearby . . . ?

She broke off the lullaby and glanced around with a half-smile on her lips, for it was possible that . . .

"Who's there?" she called out gaily.

A mild wind blew through the topmost branches of the pines so that the cones stirred and winked.

She danced about in circles until she was breathless, and then threw herself down on the sun-warmed grass, and closed her eyes, and felt within seconds how her lover approached her, crouching over her, the hairs of his mustache drawing near. . . . Ah, what if his kiss tickled! "Doesn't such a thing tickle," she had asked Irma, and both girls had collapsed in a fit of giggling, burying their overheated faces in the pillows of Irma's bed.

But she must not giggle now. She wasn't a child. The moment was sacred. Her lover (whose eyes were very dark and moist, whose mustache was small, trim, neat, and gave off an odor of wax) was simply bending over to kiss her, as lovers do, as men do, it is really quite commonplace, it is not at all unusual, nothing frightening. . . . But it might tickle.

She had expected another lover, a young man whose family owned a large farm on the Innisfail Road, ah, what was his name, how strange, how very strange, she was losing his name, though it was a name she murmured to herself a dozen times each day, what was that young man's name . . . She was expecting, perhaps, her uncle Gideon: sometimes just as she sank into sleep his lips brushed against hers: they were often in a sleigh hitched to Jupiter, flying across an ice-bound Lake Noir beneath a full moon, Gideon in the remarkable fur coat-made of muskrat pelts as darkly lustrous as mink-he had had fashioned for himself some years back, as a playful match to Leah's ankle-length Russian sable. His expression was stern, he did not smile, in fact he looked through her as he usually did around the house, and yet-suddenly-wonderfully-he leaned over to her and brushed his lips against hers- She shivered. Her eyes were not simply closed, but shut tight. Her lover was leaning over her. His eyelashes curved upward, his skin was a faint olive color, he gave off an air of profound, slack melancholy, he was no one she had ever seen before.

"Mother," Yolande would ask Lily that very day, "doesn't a kiss tickle, now tell me the truth!"

She began giggling and could not stop. Her eyes flew open, there was no one above her, she sat up, flushed, giggling so that her shoulders shook. . . . At a carnival in Powhatassie some years ago she and her friends had gone to the very exhibit their parents had forbidden them to see, the Exotic Wonders of the New World, and what sights!-what sad fraudulent sights! Dodo, the bird-faced boy with his absurd plaster beak and his slightly crossed eyes, pretending to screech while beneath the platform (Yolande claimed she could practically see it) some fool sawed away at a fiddle. Myra the Elephant Girl, really a middle-aged woman, lardy and obese, with grotesquely swollen blue-veined legs and feet the size of hams in cloth slippers. The Whipsnake Man, whose skin glinted all over with silver-gray-blue scales: even between his toes, as he solemnly revealed to his audience. A frizzy redheaded beanpole with a concave chest and legs and arms so skinny the joints looked enlarged many times, a squat toadlike creature with Tartar eyes whose specialty was scooping up insects (but were they really insects, as one of Yolande's friends whispered, maybe they were just raisins) on his rather broad tongue, a grizzled old drunk pretending to be legless (Ambrose the Veteran of Three Wars). . . . What nasty ugly things! And most of them were frauds, obviously. (You don't want to waste twenty-five cents on anything like that because, for one thing, it's all fake, Ewan had told the children.) Most ludicrous of all was a thing in a foot-high jar, the Hermaphrodite Baby, a creature with a single head and torso, and only two spindly arms, but burdened with an extra set of legs and private parts that grew out of its stomach. . . . The girls backed away from the exhibit, one or two even shielded their eyes with their fingers, but Yolande, poking them, said, "Oh, that's some stupid little old rubber doll they stuck in there-!" as they ran giggling out into the sunshine.

The attack of giggling passed. She felt suddenly tired. It was time to return home before anyone missed her.

"All right then for you, if you're not coming," she said sullenly. "Next time I won't come."

SO SHE HEADED back to the house, walking quickly, her gaze fixed on the mossy needle-strewn ground. The forest had darkened, the air was pine-sharp but melancholy, it seemed later in the day, perhaps she would be late for lunch . . . ? Though she knew the way home very well, and prided herself on her sense of direction, somehow she took a wrong turn, and passed a fallen, badly decomposed white pine she remembered having seen some fifteen or twenty minutes before. "Oh, hell, now what a silly goose you are," she muttered. So she strode off in the right direction, her head down, the straw hat clamped to her head (for it was being knocked off repeatedly by low-hanging branches that sprang out when she least expected it, and several times a malicious branch nearly poked her in the eye), and after a maddeningly long while she emerged from the forest . . . but she was at the edge of the cemetery instead of the park . . . so once again she must have turned herself around without knowing it.

"Oh, what is the matter, how can I be so . . ."

Her face went red as if she suspected someone was watching, and laughing at her distress. There was nothing to do under the circumstances but indicate that she fully realized how silly she was: imagine, getting lost in her own woods, winding up in the cemetery instead of near the house! But at least she was no longer lost. If she took the long way around, and followed Mink Creek to the lake, she would have no difficulty getting home; though she would probably miss lunch.

She climbed the hill to the cemetery, and as she swung her legs over the fence (which badly needed repairing-you'd think with all the purchases and fuss of the past few months, Leah in command, throwing money about, someone would have suggested that the cemetery be looked into) she was certain-she was certain-that someone watched her.

It might have been great-grandmother Elvira prowling about the graves with her watering-can and clippers, or it might have been aunt Della, or even grandfather Noel; it might have been some of the younger children, though they were forbidden to play here; possibly the gardener, or one of the groundsmen, though everyone complained that these men had gotten so lazy over the years, they not only didn't do all their duties but didn't exactly know what they were. . . . But no one called out to her, no one greeted her. "Why, Yolande! What are you doing here . . . ?"

Slowly and self-consciously Yolande climbed the hill, noting with a pang of guilt the gravestones in this older section of the cemetery, tilted and weather-streaked. The babies' markers were especially sad: they were so small, so flat: and there were so many of them. (There were so many Bellefleurs. More dead than living. Far more dead than living-obviously!-though Yolande had never thought of it before.) She could hear them whispering meanly as she passed: Who is that silly goose of a girl, who is she to think so well of herself?-imagine, being vain, with her snarly hair all cockleburrs, and her skirt grass-stained, and that fancy straw hat dented at the crown-and she isn't pretty if you study her profile, her nose is too long and her chin is too sharp- "I'm sorry," Yolande whimpered.

Up on the path she paused to catch her breath. It was a handsome path-pink cockleshells mixed with white gravel-but crabgrass and wild barley had poked through and were taking over. "I don't know why, I really don't know why, it isn't better kept up here," Yolande murmured. "But I promise I'll speak with them. There seems to be more money now, maybe it's only a matter of time until they get around to here. . . . No, I really don't know why, but you shouldn't blame me!"

Some distance away a figure stepped from behind a tree, where he must have been pressed flat, to behind one of the large tombs: but no, it was a shadow, it must have been a shadow, that tree was so narrow no one could have hidden behind it. Yolande circled the tomb, her heart pounding, and saw that no one was there.

"Well-that's silly! I call that absolutely silly," she said.

The dead were stirring to consciousness of her. She felt their vexation, their sleepy cranky curiosity: Who is she? Which one of us is she? When she had been very little the family had driven out to the cemetery more frequently, every Sunday in good weather, to trim the grass around certain graves, to plant annuals-geraniums, marigolds-and Yolande and the other children were given special tasks: Yolande remembered having to pick aphids off roses, wonderful big-blossoming white and red and yellow roses. (But where were the roses now?-only a few straggly climbers, overgrown, their petals tiny and anemic.) Dandelion, crabgrass, barley, wild oats, bittersweet nightshade with its small red berries. Goldenrod, of course-especially along the fence-growing as tall as five feet. Barnyard grass, gone to seed, beginning to burn out. The more recent graves were still in fairly good condition, but even here the geraniums were drying away, the clay pots were cracked or overturned, the frequent American flags, stuck into the ground, were faded and frayed: "Oh, I don't know why," Yolande whispered, "but you shouldn't blame me! I promise I will come back tomorrow and tidy things up. Not today, I feel so tired today, but tomorrow. I won't even start with people I know like Uncle Laurence and Great-aunt Adah, I'll begin with the very oldest corner, with the babies, I'll put flowers by the babies' graves first of all, the poor things don't even have any names to be called by. . . ."

A sound behind her, like a chuckle. She turned at once, blinking.

No one. Nothing.

A pair of nuthatches fluttered into view, and began pecking at a sycamore. Though Yolande knew it must have been the birds she said, nevertheless, in a hoarse brave voice: "Albert, is that you? Albert? Or Jasper? Garth?"

She was not going to run out of the cemetery, she walked along without haste, pausing at the great mausoleum near the front entrance. It was overgrown with English ivy and the colored marble eyes of the four attendant angels had grown dim, but it was still an impressive structure. Fifteen feet high, with graceful Corinthian columns, made of white Italian marble . . . designed by and made to order for great-great-grandfather Raphael. . . . Yolande had been told the name of the queer jackel-headed god that guarded the tomb, but she could not remember it now. He had grown smaller over the years but his rude grin had become even more lascivious. "Are you some sort of angel," Yolande whispered. "I'm glad I won't have to be buried in here, with you out front."

Actually, there was room in Raphael's mausoleum. There was a great deal of room. How ironic it was, how angry it must have made the old man, that no one lay in there but Raphael himself!-and then (so it was said) only part of him. (For there was a family tale, which Yolande had never believed for five minutes, that the Civil War cavalry drum kept on one of the landings of the unused central staircase was fashioned out of great-great-grandfather Raphael's skin! A clause in the crazy old man's will had insisted that his heirs have him properly skinned, and the skin treated, and made into a drum to be used daily to call the family to dinner or what not. . . . Such wild fanciful things like this that Yolande tried to keep secret from her girl friends, for fear they would think her as peculiar as her family.) But part of Raphael was buried inside, at least. Perhaps he sensed her nearness, and would have liked to speak to her . . . or was he in a perpetual black mood since none of his plans had worked out . . . ?

"I'm sorry," Yolande said. "I hope the rats haven't gotten inside here, then what would you do?" She pressed her forehead against the marble, and felt how pleasantly cool it was. (She had a headache suddenly, and the marble soothed it; or did the touch of the marble cause the headache, which came so abruptly . . . ?) "Someone should clean this for you. The birds have made such a mess in all this fancy carving, it's a good thing you can't see it! And it wasn't a good idea, maybe, to give the angels colored eyes, it makes them look . . . it makes them look a little demented, like they're about to spring into the air and flap away."

Old Raphael's plans hadn't worked out, Yolande knew. He had wanted to be governor of the state . . . or senator . . . he had had, even, ambitions for higher office: Vice President, President. President of the United States! And of course his millions of dollars weren't enough, he had always wanted more, he had wanted to be the first billionaire in this part of the world. You had to admire him, Yolande supposed. But she was just as glad he'd died many decades before her birth. There were already enough Bellefleurs for her to contend with.

Great-grandmother Elvira had said once that no one had ever been so unfortunate as her father-in-law Raphael: everyone around him disappeared into thin air! So there was no one to house in the costly mausoleum after all.

(His parents Jedediah and Germaine had already been buried, of course, and their grave marked with a handsome eight-foot granite stone; he could not unearth them and rebury them in the new mausoleum. And he did not care to unearth the Bellefleurs buried far across the lake, at the edge of Bushkill's Ferry-the Bellefleurs who had been murdered in their beds, before his birth. That sordid incident angered him not just because members of his family had been killed, and killed by malicious cowards in the dead of night, but because-because there was an incontestable shame in it. However you interpreted the massacre it was the case that the murdered Bellefleurs had been bested.) How sad, Yolande thought, circling the mausoleum. Even if he had been a difficult man (and which Bellefleur men weren't difficult?) he deserved to be buried with his loved ones close by. But it was a fact that he was alone: his wife had disappeared into Lake Noir, and her body was never recovered; his favorite son Samuel had disappeared in the very heart of the castle; and his youngest son Lamentations of Jeremiah was to be swept away in a terrible storm, only a few years before Yolande's birth.

"Oh!" Yolande cried. Suddenly, she felt the old man's spite, emanating from the grave. A piercing needle-sharp pain ran right through her forehead. "Oh, how nasty."

SHE HURRIED AWAY and saw, through pain-quickened tears, the figure of a tall gangling boy in overalls and a gray cap a short distance away. Her first reaction was simple relief: so there was someone real, after all, and not a spirit! Then, seeing the boy's derisive lopsided grin, and half-recognizing him, she hesitated, and tried to call out, "Who are you, what are you doing in-" but the words wouldn't come.

He ducked away and hid behind a tombstone. That he would do such a thing-hiding from her even as she stared at him-was such a mockery, such a peculiar prank, Yolande felt almost faint. "Oh, but I know who you are," she whispered, her fingers fumbling at the gold chain she wore around her neck, searching out the little gold cross. "Your name is . . . You live on . . . Your father is my father's . . . How dare you hide on me!"

One of the trespassers who so plagued grandfather Noel, one of the poachers, maybe, or someone fishing Mink Creek hoping none of the Bellefleurs would discover him. "I could have you arrested," Yolande whispered. "You know you're not supposed to be here, any of you." Despite her jarring heartbeat she was not frightened; she was not going to be frightened on her own soil. And with the Bellefleur dead all around her as witnesses. But still she thought it most prudent to head for the front gate. For of course he wouldn't follow her. He wouldn't dare follow her. Even now he was hunched down behind that tombstone like an idiot, pretending she hadn't seen him; pretending she didn't know he was there. Oh, maybe he was retarded, there were so many of them in the area. . . .

(Those tenant farmers and their broods of children! Illiterate louts. Savages. The men drank and beat their wives and children, the mothers drank and beat their children, the children ran wild-wouldn't go to school though the Bellefleurs, nearly single-handedly, paid for the school and the books and the teacher's salary-ran wild and set fires and injured one another, and what on earth could you do about it? The ugliest tales were told: the Varrells and the Doans and the McIntyres and the Gittings: a boy named Hank Varrell had doused someone's collie with gasoline and set him afire because the other boy hadn't believed him when he lied about some job or other he'd been promised in the city, and what was worse (so Garth said, Garth had been the one to tell Yolande about the incident) was that the sheriff hadn't even been called, because people out there were afraid Varrell might set a human being on fire next time.) So Yolande left the cemetery, and descended the hill to the creek, walking at a normal pace. She was not frightened, she was not going to allow herself to be frightened; the boy would only laugh at her; she wasn't frightened. (Though the stitch in her side had returned. And her head still ached.) She followed the fishermen's path alongside the creek, knowing the strange boy would not pursue her.

"Why, if I told Papa about this . . . or Grandpa . . . or even Garth . . . Why, Garth and his friends, or Uncle Gideon, or . . ."

She did not want to look back, for fear he was watching her, but she couldn't help herself: and there was something following her though it didn't look like the boy or even a person . . . unless it was a person crawling along through the high grass. . . .

Yolande swallowed. She felt faint. Perhaps if she ran back into the forest and hid, perhaps if she shut her eyes tight, her lover would find her, her true lover would discover her and save her and carry her back home. . . . But, ah!-it wasn't a person, it was a dog. Only a dog.

She crossed a marshy meadow, holding her skirt and petticoats off the ground (how muddy and nasty everything was!-her shoes were ruined) and saw in the corner of her eye the dog trotting parallel with her.

"You go away back home!" she cried. "You know you don't belong here!"

If only her lover would appear: he would clap his hands vigorously and frighten the dog away. And sliding his arm across her shoulders he would walk her back to the house. . . .

"Shoo! Go away! Go home where you belong!" Yolande cried.

It wasn't a dog she recognized. A hound with a mud-splattered yellowish hide, and a tail that had never been trimmed. Even at this distance Yolande could see it had the mange. Odd, how it contemplated her as it trotted along; its expression was almost human.

"You heard me-we don't allow stray dogs on our property," Yolande said, beginning to sob.

The creature paused, lifted one hind leg, and in response to her words urinated on a clump of weed flowers.

"Oh, aren't you nasty. . . . Dogs are so nasty . . ." Yolande whispered.

She turned and walked faster and believed she could see, a mile or so away, the towers of the castle, the towers of her home. She would be there in a little while and they would take care of her and the hound wouldn't dare follow her, any more than the boy had dared follow her, and she would tell her father and Uncle Gideon about what had happened, and then . . . The yellow dog trotted beside her, now at a distance, now uncomfortably close, growling and nipping at her heels, and then falling back, half-cringing, staring at her with his dark moist eyes. He was seeing her, he was thinking about her. . . . Yolande tried to keep from sobbing. Because if she once gave in, she couldn't stop. But her hat was gone: her hat had been knocked off and was lost and she didn't dare look for it: so the sobs began. The dog, keeping pace with her, its tongue lolling, drew its lips back from its stained teeth in a look of studied derision.

The Room of Contamination.

On the third floor of the northwest wing of Bellefleur Manor, overlooking the immense muscular grace of the cedar of Lebanon, and, in the distance, the mist-shrouded slopes of Mount Chattaroy, was the extraordinary room known at first as the Turquoise Room-for, some years after the completion of the castle, when it was believed (erroneously, as it turned out) that the Baron and Baroness von Richthofen were to be monthlong guests of Raphael Bellefleur, this part of the northwest wing was redone as a combination guest room and drawing room, in a most elegant fashion: on one wall was a large plate-glass mirror, approximately six by ten feet, enclosed in a bower supported by two pairs of highly ornate columns from Pisa, of Italian Renaissance design; fronting the mirror was a latticed grillwork giving a delicate, somewhat precious floral effect with vines and small wine-dark roses; descending from the vaulted ceiling were three dragon-ornamented chandeliers, in gold and crystal; above the fireplace were four oak-sculpted figures, of indeterminate age and gender, swathed in long voluptuous gowns; the floor was marble, and always chilly; there were, on the walls, paintings attributed to Montecelli, Thomas Faed, and Jan Anthonisz van Ravestyn; and the furniture and ornamentation were finished predominately in turquoise and gold. It was rumored that more than $150,000 had gone into the Turquoise Room alone but the exact figures were never known except to Raphael Bellefleur, who of course spoke to no one about financial matters, not even his brother, or his eldest son. (It was characteristic of Raphael's studied generosity that, in 1861, he would hire to take his place in the 14th Regiment of the Seventh Corps of the Union Army of the Potomac not one but two bounty soldiers, and that though he contracted to pay them a fairly small, fixed price, he in fact paid them far more, on the condition that they tell no one-no one at all-exactly how much he was paying. And since one of the soldiers died almost immediately, in Missouri, and the other was to die at Antietam, under McClellan, the extent of Raphael's largess was never known.) The Turquoise Room was probably the most beautiful room in the manor but within a few years it was closed off from the rest of the house, its great tulipwood door locked forever, and it came to be known-in whispers, predominately among the servants-as the Room of Contamination.

For more than seventy-five years the door has been locked, Vernon told Germaine, walking with her in the garden, pointing to the windows on the third floor, beneath a particularly rain-rotted pinnacled roof: and the door will always remain locked.

The little girl, not plump so much as sturdy, solid, strong, peered up at the bay windows with their heavy mullions and tracery, and did not ask why, as if she knew the answer very well.

(The other children, overhearing, naturally asked why, and Vernon told them the room was accursed, it was contaminated, no one must ever be allowed to set foot in it again: for something terrible had happened to their great-great-uncle Samuel Bellefleur in that room, when he was still a young man in his twenties. And naturally the children asked what had happened to him; even Little Goldie, who was customarily silent in Vernon's presence, as if his very warmth, his unstudied affection, intimidated her, joined the chorus asking what? why? were there ghosts? was he murdered? what was in the terrible room?) Even when the unfortunate Lamentations of Jeremiah was hounded by his late father's creditors into auctioning off paintings, statuary, and other luxurious furnishings, a mere three years after Raphael's death, the Room of Contamination was not unlocked. Had Jeremiah wanted it open, Elvira would not have consented, for she had agreed to marry into the Bellefleurs only upon the condition that (for rumors spread so wildly in the north country!) certain rooms in the castle never be opened, and certain misfortunes never be dwelt upon; and even if Elvira had given her consent, no servants would have been willing to cross the threshold. . . . The room was not simply haunted, it was contaminated. To breathe its air was to risk madness and death, and even dissolution. (Ah, but one midsummer night, overly stimulated by the public fireworks display the Bellefleurs had put on along the southern shore of the lake, Gideon and Nicholas Fuhr, then in their late teens, rode back to the manor alone with the intention of prying open the door. The fireworks display had been magnificent, spectators for many miles around had come to stare, reduced to awed silence by the ingenious kaleidoscopic explosions, the "Eruption of Mount Vesuvius," the "Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac," "God punishing the cities of the plain"-and for some reason it occurred to the boys that they would never again have such an opportunity to explore the Room of Contamination. Of course they did not believe that the room was really "contaminated"; they knew very well that the old tales of ghosts and spirits were absurd; so there was hardly any risk in what they did, apart from the risk of punishment should they be caught. But when, with two crowbars, a screwdriver, and spike and a mallet, they tried to open the door (beautifully carved in rococo fashion and finished in gold and turquoise), they felt almost immediately the queerest sense of . . . of languor . . . languor and vertigo . . . as if they were at the bottom of the ocean, barely able to lift their arms, barely able to keep their heads from nodding. . . . There was such a pressure on every square inch of their bodies, even on their eyeballs, that each found it too difficult to speak, to explain to the other that he was weak . . . or ill . . . or dizzy . . . or suddenly frightened. After no more than ten minutes Gideon dropped his instruments and stumbled away, and Nicholas crawled after him, and neither boy was to mention the episode to each other, ever again.) Young Samuel Bellefleur had deeply gratified his father by graduating with honors from West Point, and by having been promoted, at the age of twenty-six, to the rank of first lieutenant in the Chautauqua Light Guard. Though photographs showed a conventionally handsome boyish young man with deep-set Bellefleur eyes and a small prim mustache and something both impetuous and smug in the set of his jaw, it was said that no one-no man-in the entire north country was so attractive. He possessed a remarkable grace and composure, whether riding in procession on his English bay, Herod, in the splendor of his full-dress uniform, with the chin strap of the towering ermine helmet cutting deep into his flesh, and his white-gloved hand casually on his saber; or dancing at one or another of the lavish balls that were so popular in the fifties, among the landowners in the Valley; or debating certain lively issues of the day with his father and his father's friends-the Paine decision of 1852, for instance, which freed a group of eight slaves brought to New York for reshipment to Texas, and caused great distress among the slave-owning states and great delight elsewhere-in Raphael's handsome drawing room. His fair brown hair was charmingly wavy, his voice was usually well modulated and gentle, his manners were gracious if somewhat self-conscious, and he put to shame his loutish brothers Rodman and Felix (or Jeremiah, as Raphael insisted he be called) simply by the way he entered a room, approached his mother, raised her limp hand to his lips and bowed over it, his heels smartly but inconspicuously together. In secret he scorned the passivity, the weakness, the "holy" patience of Violet Odlin Bellefleur, and did no more than pretend, with minimal effort, to believe the High Church claptrap she evidently believed; he was really not much more respectful of Raphael's "beliefs"-which he saw, not altogether fairly, as hypocritical-though he was certainly respectful of Raphael's behavior, and of Raphael's considerable financial success. "To hear the old man talk in public," Samuel said to his closest friends, officers in the Light Guard like himself, "you'd think he wanted a monopoly on lumbering in the mountains only to further God's work on earth, and to be in a position to bolster up the new party, wouldn't you!"-the new party being, at that time, the Republican Party. But in Raphael's presence he always behaved with dignified respect, and made a show of listening-or perhaps he actually did listen-when his father launched into one of his long, convoluted, grimly persuasive monologues about the graft, corruption, and outright wickedness in the Democratic Party, the Luciferian dimensions of Stephen Douglas, and the need to bear in mind at all times Hobbes's admonition that men require a common power to keep them in awe, for otherwise they will be plunged into war: outright war. (In secret, of course, they are locked in a perpetual though unacknowledged war, of which economic struggle is but one manifestation.) Samuel was frequently embarrassed by the intensity of his father's sentiments; he much preferred horse racing, card games, hunting and fishing, dancing and parties, and of course excited speculation on the future (for surely the future involved war?), and who might marry whom. Though no one in the family ever mentioned the Bellefleurs' tragic past (that massacre in Bushkill's Ferry!-Samuel detested the victims as well as the murderers, and wondered if his friends murmured behind his back and expected him to pursue that old shameful feud), Samuel was as conscious of it as his brothers, and resolved that the future of the Bellefleurs would be as pure as the past was despoiled; and if, or when, he died, he would die with dignity, his saber in his hand. He would certainly not be surprised in his bed. . . .

A year or two before Samuel's experience in the Turquoise Room, he was engaged to the youngest daughter of Hans Dietrich, whose fortune and castellated mansion on the Nautauga River, if not his land (he owned only ten thousand acres, though they consisted of fertile valley farmland and a thick pine and spruce forest he would not allow to be thinned) rivaled those of Raphael Bellefleur himself. Dietrich made his initial money in wheat, and ventured, with minimal success, into hops at about the same time Raphael Bellefleur conceived of the scheme of creating the world's largest hop-growing plantation (though the scheme was not to be realized until after 1865); he became increasingly reckless with his investments, since in general they did so well, and made him so outlandishly rich. Consequently he paid no attention when Raphael (who had certainly hesitated before speaking out, knowing it an imprudent maneuver in the unacknowledged war of which Hobbes wrote so persuasively) came to Dietrich Castle one day to warn him against entering into a partnership with a man named Jay Gould, about whom Raphael had heard paradoxical and disturbing things. . . . So it seemed quite fitting, even to his friends, when Dietrich lost his fortune, and rather than file for bankruptcy and allow his numerous enemies to gloat over his shame, and even to prowl about his castle on auction day, he wandered off alone in his beloved woodlands above the Alder River to die in one of those "white mist" storms that can last for a week without lifting. The engagement, naturally, was broken off, though Samuel was halfway tempted-for he did think highly of the girl, despite knowing her only superficially-he did love her-to insist upon the wedding in the face of his father's and even the Dietriches' opposition: but in the end nothing came of it. The engagement was broken, the family moved away, the castle's furnishings were sold at auction for a fraction of their price and the castle itself (a pretentious monstrosity, the Bellefleurs thought, modeled after a medieval Rhennish fortress, with rugged stonework that gave it a pockmarked appearance, and a ludicrous number of turrets, towers, battlements, balconies, and windows of all fanciful distracting shapes: diamond, square, rectanglar, elliptical) was eventually sold to a Dutchman who had made his fortune in bricks, in Manhattan, and who wanted to retire to the north country, where fish and wild game were so famously plentiful. . . . (At the time of Germaine's birth all that remained of Dietrich Castle was the central, squarish, four-storeyed tower, rising battle-worn and pockmarked out of a field of rubble.) For many years, however, people as far away as Contracoeur and Paie-des-Sables reported seeing Dietrich wandering in snowstorms, stumbling and groping about in the lurid white mist, at times a gigantic figure, even fatter than Dietrich had been in life, at other times lank and shriveled, and always shy-he fled from them, the legend went. But Samuel knew such tales were sheer rubbish, like the rumors he absorbed rather than overheard about his parents, and brushed them away with an airy cavalier gesture.

He would never have had his curious initial experience in the Turquoise Room, and the tragedy that followed would never have taken place, had it not been for a set of circumstances nearly too complex (so Vernon said, though perhaps he didn't exactly know all that had happened) to transcribe. But Samuel's uncle Arthur was back from the Kansas Territory filled with incoherent but impassioned praise for a man who had, evidently, along with several of his own sons, hacked five proslavers to death at Pottawatomie Creek. The man's name was John Brown, already one of the most famous of the free-soil agitators, and Arthur Bellefleur-until only a few years previously a shy, stammering, portly youth with an inclination toward the ministry, as some have an inclination toward respiratory ailments, until, one evening at a church hall in Rockland when he heard Brown, in person, speak of the evil of slavery and the necessity for man to wreak God's vengeance on the slavers, he had become transformed-"converted"-Arthur, still stammering, though no longer shy, a deerskin outfit stretched tight across his penguin shape, his hands and saliva flying about, seemed to be reasoning with-was in fact reasoning with-his brother Raphael to give him not only the use of the coachman's lodge and a number of the guest chambers of the manor for an unspecified amount of time (indeed, some of Brown's soldiers-though not Brown himself-were already there, in the kitchen, eating and drinking ravenously all that Violet had directed should be offered them: ten or twelve bearded and disheveled men, three of them husky brutish runaway slaves with skins of an unimagined blackness), and not only a generous amount of money in support of the cause (for Brown, Old Osawatomie, though in hiding and rumored to be wounded, would soon return to initiate a series of guerrilla raids of slaveholding settlements, and he was calling for at least two hundred rifles), and not only some five or ten or fifty or two hundred acres of wilderness land so that Brown could, when he wished, establish a rival nation, a "second government" with a population center to rival that of Washington, D.C., as the struggle against the abomination, slavery, grew in ferocity-but also (and here Samuel had to marvel at his uncle's audacity) Raphael Bellefleur's personal blessing.

"John Brown has said, and you must know it to be true, that the slaveholders have forfeited their right to live," Arthur said. "You can't deny the truth of that statement."

"You're asking me to condone murder," Raphael said in a queer drawling voice. He seemed disoriented, as if he and not his brother had just rushed in out of the night.

From boyhood on Samuel and his brothers had been accustomed to hearing their father discuss politics with his friends and political associates, primarily upstate Whigs, and there were numerous occasions when the discussions became animated, and boisterous, and almost-though never quite-violent; and there had been a dismaying interlude of several weeks when their aunt Fredericka, Raphael's sister, then thirty-six years old, had pleaded without success for the entire family's conversion to her new religion-"True Inspiration," it was called by its small number of followers, headed at that time by a maniac German named Christian Metz-or, at the very least, financial support for the sect's community five hundred miles to the west at Eben-Ezer ("Hitherto the Lord has helped us"). ("You are blind to the truth that stares you in the face, that shouts at you to listen, poor sinner, and rejoice that the scales have at last fallen from your eyes!" Fredericka wept, daring to put her hands on her brother-who was so appalled by the disorder of her hair and dress, and by the fact that she would actually touch him, he had not the presence of mind to thrust her away.) So the boys were accustomed to lengthy debates, some more spirited than others, some more susceptible to absurd rhetorical displays than others. But the intensity of the quarrel between Arthur and Raphael was alarmingly different.

"You dare not deny the truth of what we say!" Arthur shouted.

"Brown is a murderer!" Raphael shouted.

"We are at war, in war there is no murder!"

"Brown is a maniac and a murderer!"

"I tell you, we are at war! You are the maniac-the murderer-to deny it!"

Samuel knew that his father believed, as he himself did, and most people did, that the Negroes were sons of Ham, and accursed; they didn't feel pain or exhaustion or despair like the white race, not even like Raphael's Irish laborers, and they certainly did not possess "souls"-though it was clear they were more highly developed than horses and dogs. Exactly what they were, what they represented, how responsible for their own damnation they were, was debatable; and under ordinary circumstances, with a rational opponent, Raphael would have enjoyed a debate. But Arthur had clearly been touched by madness himself. The Old Man had, he said, put a hand on his shoulder and declared him a lieutenant colonel in the army to overturn slavery, and tears had poured down his cheeks, and he had known at that moment why he lived.

Politically Raphael Bellefleur opposed slavery because he opposed the Democrats; privately he knew the system to be an enviable one-it answered the only important moral requirement that might reasonably be asked of an economic strategy: it worked. (And wasn't it the case, he asked Arthur, on the very night of Arthur's arrival, that some stocks of men are clearly bred for labor in the fields, and others for thinking; wasn't it the case-ah, so obviously!-that some creatures are born to be slaves, and others to rule?) God did not create all men equal, even in heaven there is a division of labor, a hierarchy, and if one didn't believe in heaven, or in God (though Arthur evidently did) then one must acknowledge that nature herself insisted upon the dominion of men over beasts, and the dominion of some men over others-for how, otherwise, had slavery ever come about? "Free the black man and leave him to his own devices, and he'll soon have his own slaves," Raphael said angrily. And flailed about, groping and stammering, quoting Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War (". . . it is a general necessary law of nature to rule wherever one can"). And Arthur, trembling, ignored his words as if they were too contemptible to be acknowledged, and said: "What John Brown is doing is nothing less than the greatest service any man can render to God at the present time."

From somewhere Samuel's once-meek uncle, a comical little figure with his penguin's body and his penguinlike manner of holding his short arms out from his body stiffly, as if he didn't know quite what to do with them, had learned to speak in a low, level, forceful, dramatic way, and to fix his eyes fiercely upon his listener; he had learned, Samuel couldn't help but see, a soldier's courage. It was of course ridiculous that he should claim to believe-that any white man should claim with a straight face to believe-that the black race not only should be raised to the level of the white race, but would be raised, and within a generation. It was ridiculous too that God should so frequently be invoked in what was a political matter. Nevertheless Samuel admired Arthur's strength of conviction, and even his fanatical energy. Why, he was willing to die for the insurrectionist cause . . . !

So when Raphael turned to his eldest son and asked, with a dry, sardonic dignity, his eyes half-shut behind the shining lenses of his pince-nez, what his opinion on the subject was, Samuel's heart swelled with a not-altogether sincere rush of sympathy, and he said: "They may have justice on their side, Father." Seeing Raphael's queer pinched look he paused, and then went on, with an almost boyish pleasure at the gravity of the moment, "Or at least history."

Consequently it came about . . . and how immediately it came about, with what passion, must be an indication (so Vernon believed) of Raphael Bellefleur's derangement, or imbalance, as early as the mid-fifties . . . that with a furious mock-servility Raphael changed his mind about driving the scruffy little gang of "soldiers" away, and made a show of insisting to Arthur that they remain in the manor as his guests, his personal guests: two or three of them might even wish (unless Arthur wished?) to reside in the Turquoise Room.