I glanced at the books. "What are you doing, Greek?"

Henry set the cup back into its saucer. "A translation of Paradise Lost."

"Into what language?"

"Latin," he said solemnly.

"Hmm," I said. "Why?"

"I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English-of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I'm referring to is the later work. In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose." He lay his cigarette back in the ashtray. I stared at it burning. "Will you have some coffee?"

"No, thank you."

"I hope you slept well."

"Yes, thanks."

"I sleep better out here than I usually do," said Henry, adjusting his glasses and bending back over the lexicon. There was a subtle evidence of fatigue, and strain, in the slope of his shoulder which I, a veteran of many sleepless nights, recognized immediately. Suddenly I realized that this unprofitable task of his was probably nothing more than a method of whiling away the early morning hours, much as other insomniacs do crossword puzzles.

"Are you always up this early?" I asked him.

"Almost always," he said without looking up. "It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable."

"I know what you mean," I said, and I did. About the only time of day I had been able to stand in Plano was the very early morning, almost dawn, when the streets were empty and the light was golden and kind on the dry grass, the chain-link fences, the solitary scrub-oaks.

Henry looked up from his books at me, almost curiously. "You're not very happy where you come from, are you?" he said.

I was startled at this Holmes-like deduction. He smiled at my evident discomfiture.

"Don't worry. You hide it very cleverly," he said, going back to his book. Then he looked up again. "The others really don't understand that sort of thing, you know."

He said this without malice, without empathy, without even much in the way of interest. I was not even sure what he meant, but, for the first time, I had a glimmer of something I had not previously understood: why the others were all so fond of him. Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes; the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food-acquired then, and largely, I must admit, in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class-have stayed with me through the years. It is easy, even now, for me to remember what their daily routines, which subsequently became my own, were like. Regardless of circumstance they lived like clockwork, with surprisingly little of that chaos which to me had always seemed so inherent a part of college life-irregular diet and work habits, trips to the laundromat at one a.m. There were certain times of the day or night, even when the world was falling in, when you could always find Henry in the all-night study room of the library, or when you knew it would be useless to even look for Bunny, because he was on his Wednesday date with Marion or his Sunday walk. (Rather in the way that the Roman Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained intact even during the terrible days after Bunny's death. Up until the very end there was always, always, Sunday-night dinner at Charles and Camilla's, except on the evening of the murder itself, when no one felt much like eating and it was postponed until Monday.) I was surprised by how easily they managed to incorporate me into their cyclical, Byzantine existence. They were all so used to one another that I think they found me refreshing, and they were intrigued by even the most mundane of my habits: by my fondness for mystery novels and my chronic movie-going; by the fact that I used disposable razors from the supermarket and cut my own hair instead of going to the barber; even by the fact that I read papers and watched news on television from time to time (a habit which seemed to them an outrageous eccentricity, peculiar to me alone; none of them were the least bit interested in anything that went on in the world, and their ignorance of current events and even recent history was rather astounding. Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me that men had walked on the moon. "No," he said, putting down his fork.

"It's true," chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up along the way.

"I don't believe it."

"I saw it," said Bunny. "It was on television."

"How did they get there? When did this happen?").

They were still overwhelming as a group, and it was on an individual basis that I really got to know them. Because he knew I kept late hours, too, Henry would sometimes stop by late at night, on his way home from the library. Francis, who was a terrible hypochondriac and refused to go to the doctor alone, frequently dragged me along and it was, oddly enough, during those drives to the allergist in Manchester or the ear-nose-and-throat man in Keene that we became friends. That fall, he had to have a root canal, over about four or five weeks; each Wednesday afternoon he would show up, white-faced and silent, at my room, and we would go together to a bar in town and drink until his appointment, at three. The ostensible purpose of my coming was so I could drive him home when he got out, woozy with laughing gas, but as I waited for him at the bar while he went across the street to the dentist's office, I was generally in no better condition to drive than he was.

I liked the twins most. They treated me in a happy, offhand manner which implied I'd known them much longer than I had. Camilla I was fondest of, but as much as I enjoyed her company I was slightly uneasy in her presence; not because of any lack of charm or kindness on her part, but because of a too-strong wish to impress her on mine. Though I looked forward to seeing her, and thought of her anxiously and often, I was more comfortable with Charles. He was a lot like his sister, impulsive and generous, but more moody; and though he sometimes had long gloomy spells, he was very talkative when not suffering from these. In either mood, I got along with him well. We borrowed Henry's car, drove to Maine so he could have a club sandwich in a bar he liked there; went to Bennington, Manchester, the greyhound track in Pownal, where he ended up bringing home a dog too old to race, in order to save it from being put to sleep. The dog's name was Frost. It loved Camilla, and followed her everywhere: Henry quoted long passages about Emma Bovary and her greyhound: "Sa pensee, sans but d'abord, vagabondait au hasard, comme sa levrette, qui faisait des cercles dans la campagne...." But the dog was weak, and highly strung, and suffered a heart attack one bright December morning in the country, leaping from the porch in happy pursuit of a squirrel. This was by no means unexpected; the man at the track had warned Charles that she might not live the week; still, the twins were upset, and we spent a sad afternoon burying her in the back garden of Francis's house, where one of Francis's aunts had an elaborate cat cemetery, complete with headstones.

The dog was fond of Bunny, too. It used to go with Bunny and me on long, grueling rambles through the countryside every Sunday, over fences and streams, through bogs and pastures. Bunny was himself as fond of walks as an old mutt-his hikes were so exhausting, he had a hard time finding anyone to accompany him except me and the dog-but it was because of those walks that I became familiar with the land around Hampden, the logging roads and hunter's trails, all his hidden waterfalls and secret swimming holes.

Bunny's girlfriend, Marion, was around surprisingly little; partially, I think, because he didn't want her there but also, I think, because she was even less interested in us than we were in her. ("She likes to be with her girlfriends a lot," Bunny would say boastfully to Charles and me. "They talk about clothes and boys and all that kind of malarkey. You know.") She was a small, petulant blonde from Connecticut, pretty in the same standard, round-faced way in which Bunny was handsome, and her manner of dress was at once girlish and shockingly matronly-flowered skirts, monogrammed sweaters with bags and shoes to match. From time to time I would see her at a distance in the playground of the Early Childhood Center as I walked to class. It was some branch of the Elementary Education department at Hampden; kids from the town went to nursery school and kindergarten there, and there she would be with them, in her monogrammed sweaters, blowing a whistle and trying to make them all shut up and get in line.

No one would talk about it much, but I gathered that earlier, abortive attempts to include Marion in the activities of the group had ended in disaster. She liked Charles, who was generally polite to everyone and had the unflagging capacity to carry on conversations with anyone from little kids to the ladies who worked in the cafeteria; and she regarded Henry, as did most everyone who knew him, with a kind of fearful respect; but she hated Camilla, and between her and Francis there had been some catastrophic incident which was so frightful that no one would even talk about it. She and Bunny had a relationship the likes of which I had seldom seen except in couples married for twenty years or more, a relationship which vacillated between the touching and the annoying. In her dealings with him she was very bossy and businesslike, treating him in much the same way she handled her kindergarten pupils; he responded in kind, alternately wheedling, affectionate, or sulky. Most of the time he bore her nagging patiently, but when he did not, terrible fights ensued. Sometimes he would knock on my door late at night, looking haggard and wild-eyed and more rumpled than usual, mumbling, "Lemme in, old man, you gotta help me, Marion's on the warpath...." Minutes later, there would be a neat report of sharp knocks at the door: rat-a-tat-tat. It would be Marion, her little mouth tight, looking like a small, angry doll.

"Is Bunny there?" she would say, stretching up on tiptoe and craning to look past me into the room.

"He's not here."

"Are you sure?"

"He's not here, Marion."

"Bunny!" she would call out ominously.

No answer.

"Bunny!"

And then, to my acute embarrassment, Bunny would emerge sheepishly in the doorway. "Hello, sweetie."

"Where have you been?"

Bunny would hem and haw.

"Well, I think we need to talk."

"I'm busy now, honey."

"Well-" she would look at her tasteful little Carrier watch-"I'm going home now. I'll be up for about thirty minutes and then I'm going to sleep."

"Fine."

"I'll see you in about twenty minutes, then."

"Hey, wait just a second there. I never said I was going to-"

"See you in a little while," she would say, and leave.

"I'm not going," Bunny would say.

"No, I wouldn't."

"I mean, who does she think she is."

"Don't go."

"I mean, gotta teach her a lesson sometime. I'm a busy man. On the move. My time's my own."

"Exactly."

An uneasy silence would fall. Finally Bunny would get up. "Guess I better go."

"All right, Bun."

"I mean, I'm not gonna go over to Marion's, if that's what you think," he'd say defensively.

"Of course not."

"Yes, yes," Bunny would say distractedly, and bluster away.

The next day, he and Marion would be having lunch together or walking down by the playground. "So you and Marion got everything straightened out, huh?" one of us would ask when next we saw him alone.

"Oh, yeah," Bunny would say, embarrassed.

The weekends at Francis's house were the happiest times. The trees turned early that fall but the days stayed warm well into October, and in the country we spent most of our time outside. Apart from the occasional, half-hearted game of tennis (overhead volley going out of court; poking dispiritedly in the tall grass with the ends of our rackets for the lost ball) we never did anything very athletic; something about the place inspired a magnificent laziness I hadn't known since childhood.

Now that I think about it, it seems while we were out there we drank almost constantly-never very much at once, but the thin trickle of spirits which began with the Bloody Marys at breakfast would last until bedtime, and that, more than anything else, was probably responsible for our torpor. Bringing a book outside to read, I would fall asleep almost immediately in my chair; when I took the boat out I soon tired of rowing and allowed myself to drift all afternoon. (That boat! Sometimes, even now, when I have trouble sleeping, I try to imagine that I am lying in that rowboat, my head pillowed on the cross-slats of the stern, water lapping hollow through the wood and yellow birch leaves floating down to brush my face.) Occasionally, we would attempt something a little more ambitious. Once, when Francis found a Beretta and ammunition in his aunt's night table, we went through a brief spate of target practice (the greyhound, jumpy from years of the starting gun, had to be secluded in the cellar), shooting at mason jars that were lined on a wicker tea-table we'd dragged into the yard. But that came to a quick end when Henry, who was very nearsighted, shot and killed a duck by mistake. He was quite shaken by it and we put the pistol away.

The others liked croquet, but Bunny and I didn't; neither of us ever quite got the hang of it, and we always hacked and sliced at the ball as if we were playing golf. Every now and then, we roused ourselves sufficiently to go on a picnic. We were always too ambitious at the outset-the menu elaborate, the chosen spot distant and obscure-they invariably ended with all of us hot and sleepy and slightly drunk, reluctant to start the long trudge home with the picnic things. Usually we lay around on the grass all afternoon, drinking martinis from a thermos bottle and watching the ants crawl in a glittering black thread on the messy cake plate, until finally the martinis ran out, and the sun went down, and we had to straggle home for dinner in the dark.

It was always a tremendous occasion if Julian accepted an invitation to dinner in the country. Francis would order all kinds of food from the grocery store and leaf through cookbooks and worry for days about what to serve, what wine to serve with it, which dishes to use, what to have in the wings as a backup course should the souffle fall. Tuxedos went to the cleaners; flowers came from the florists; Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.

I don't know why we insisted on making such a production of these dinners, because by the time Julian arrived we were invariably nervous and exhausted. They were a dreadful strain for everyone, the guest included, I am sure-though he always behaved with the greatest good cheer, and was graceful, and charming, and unflaggingly delighted with everyone and everything-this despite the fact that he only accepted on the average about one of every three such invitations. I found myself less able to conceal the evidences of stress, in my uncomfortable borrowed tuxedo, and with my less-than-extensive knowledge of dining etiquette. The others were more practiced at this particular dissimulation. Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room-curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in the kitchen, everyone tugging at collars and dull-eyed with fatigue-but the instant the doorbell rang their spines would straighten, conversation would snap to life, the very wrinkles would fall from their clothes.

Though, at the time, I found those dinners wearing and troublesome, now I find something very wonderful in my memory of them: that dark cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our faces luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.

There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. "Live forever," he says.

And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. "Live forever," we chorus, throwing our glasses back in unison.

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.

I wonder now that I was around them so much and yet knew so little of what was happening at the end of that term. Physically, there was very little indication that anything was happening at all-they were too clever for that-but even the tiny discrepancies that squeaked through their guard I met with a kind of willful blindness. That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn't let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same. I knew, for instance, that the five of them sometimes did things-what, exactly, I didn't know-without inviting me, and that if put on the spot they would all stick together and lie about it, in a casual and quite convincing fashion. They were so convincing, in fact, so faultlessly orchestrated in the variations and counterpoint of falsehood (the twins's unblinking carelessness striking a bright true note against Bunny's tomfoolery, or Henry's bored irritation at rehashing a trivial sequence of events) that I usually found myself believing them, often against evidence to the contrary.

Of course, I can see traces of what went on-to their credit, quite small traces-in retrospect; in the way they would sometimes disappear, very mysteriously, and hours later be vague about their whereabouts; in private jokes, asides in Greek or even Latin which I was well aware were meant to go over my head. Naturally, I disliked this, but there seemed nothing alarming or unusual about it; though some of those casual remarks and private jokes assumed a horrific significance much later. Towards the end of that term, for instance, Bunny had a maddening habit of breaking out into choruses of "The Farmer in the Dell"; I found it merely annoying and could not understand the violent agitation to which it provoked the rest of them: not knowing then, as I do now, that it must have chilled them all to the bone.

Of course I noticed things. I suppose, being around them as much as I was, it would have been impossible not to. But they were mostly quirks, discrepancies, most of them so minor that it will perhaps show you how little reason I had to imagine that anything was wrong. For instance: All five of them seemed unusually accident-prone. They were always getting scratched by cats, or cutting themselves shaving, or stumbling over footstools in the dark-reasonable explanations, certainly, but for sedentary people they had an odd excess of bruises and small wounds. There was also a strange preoccupation with the weather; strange, to me, because none of them seemed to be involved in activity which might be aided or impeded by weather of any sort. And yet they were obsessed with it, Henry in particular. He was concerned, primarily, with rapid drops in temperature; sometimes, in the car, he would punch around as frantically on the radio as a sea captain before a storm, searching for barometric readings, long-range forecasts, data of any sort. The news that the mercury was sinking would plunge him into a sudden, inexplicable gloom. I wondered what he would do when winter came; but by the first snowfall, the preoccupation had vanished, never to return.

Little things. I remember waking up once in the country at six o'clock, while everyone was still in bed, and going downstairs to find the kitchen floors freshly washed, still wet, immaculate except for the bare, mysterious footprint of a Man Friday in the clean sandbank between water heater and porch. Sometimes I woke nights out there, half-dreaming, but vaguely conscious of something; muffled voices, movement, the greyhound whining softly and pawing at my bedroom door.... Once I heard a muttered exchange between the twins about some bed sheets. "Silly," Camilla was whispering-and I caught a glimpse of ragged, fluttering cloth, streaked with mud-"you took the wrong ones. We can't bring them back like this."

"We'll substitute the others."

"But they'll know. The Linen Service ones have a stamp. We'll have to say we lost them."

Though this exchange did not remain in my mind for long, I was puzzled, and even more so by the twins' unsatisfactory manner when I asked about it. Another oddity was my discovery, one afternoon, of a large copper pot bubbling on the back burner of the stove, a peculiar smell emanating from it. I lifted the lid and a cloud of pungent, bitter steam hit me in the face. The pot was filled with limp, almond-shaped leaves, boiling away in about half a gallon of blackish water. What in God's name, I thought, perplexed but also amused, and when I asked Francis he said, curtly, "For my bath."

It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don't know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together-my future, my past, the whole of my life-and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!

We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing showers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers. While the twins played cards at one end of the table, and Henry worked at the other, Francis sat curled in the window seat with a plate of little sandwiches in his lap, reading, in French, the Memoires of the Duc de Saint-Simon, which for some reason he was determined to get through. He had gone to several schools in Europe and spoke excellent French, though he pronounced it with the same lazy, snob accent as his English; sometimes I got him to help me with my own lessons in first-year French, tedious little stories about Marie and Jean-Claude going to the tabac, which he read aloud in a languishing, hilarious drawl ("Marie a apporte des legumes a son frere") that sent everyone into hysterics. Bunny lay on his stomach on the hearth rug, doing his homework; occasionally he would steal one of Francis's sandwiches or ask a pained question. Though Greek gave him so much trouble, he'd actually studied it far longer than any of the rest of us, since he was twelve, a circumstance about which he perpetually boasted. He suggested slyly that this had simply been a childish whim of his, a manifestation of early genius a la Alexander Pope; but the truth of the matter (as I learned from Henry) was that he suffered from fairly severe dyslexia and the Greek had been a mandatory course of therapy, his prep school having theorized it was good to force dyslexic students to study languages like Greek, Hebrew and Russian, which did not utilize the Roman alphabet. At any rate, his talent as a linguist was considerably less than he led one to believe, and he was unable to wade through even the simplest assignments without continual questions, complaints, and infusions of food. Towards the end of term he had a flare-up of asthma and wandered wheezing around the house in pajamas and bathrobe, hair standing on end, gasping theatrically at his inhaler. The pills he took for it (I was informed, behind his back) made him irritable, kept him up at night, made him gain weight. And I accepted this explanation for much of Bunny's crabbiness at the end of the term, which subsequently I was to find was due to entirely different reasons.

What should I tell you? About the Saturday in December that Bunny ran around the house at five in the morning, yelling "First snow!" and pouncing on our beds? Or the time Camilla tried to teach me the box step; or the time Bunny turned the boat over-with Henry and Francis in it-because he thought he saw a water snake? About Henry's birthday party, or about the two instances when Francis's mother-all red hair and alligator pumps and emeralds-turned up on her way to New York, trailing the Yorkshire terrier and the second husband? (She was a wild card, that mother of his; and Chris, her new husband, was a bit player in a soap opera, barely older than Francis. Olivia was her name. At the time I first met her, she had just been released from the Betty Ford Center after having been cured of alcoholism and an unspecified drug habit, and was launching merrily down the path of sin again. Charles once told me that she had knocked on his door in the middle of the night and asked if he would care to join her and Chris in bed. I still get cards from her at Christmas.) One day, however, remains particularly vivid, a brilliant Saturday in October, one of the last summery days we had that year. The night before-which had been rather cold-we'd stayed up drinking and talking till almost dawn, and I woke late, hot and vaguely nauseated, to find my blankets kicked to the foot of the bed and sun pouring through the window. I lay very still for a long time. The sun filtered through my eyelids a bright, painful red, and my damp legs prickled with the heat. Beneath me, the house was silent, shimmering and oppressive.

I made my way downstairs, my feet creaking on the steps. The house was motionless, empty. Finally I found Francis and Bunny on the shady side of the porch. Bunny had on a T-shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts; Francis, his face flushed a blotchy albino pink, and his eyelids closed and almost fluttering with pain, was wearing a ratty terry-cloth robe that was stolen from a hotel.

They were drinking prairie oysters. Francis pushed his over to me without looking at it. "Here, drink this," he said, "I'll be sick if I look at it another second."

The yolk quivered, gently, in its bloody bath of ketchup and Worcestershire. "I don't want it," I said, and pushed it back.

He crossed his legs and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. "I don't know why I make these things," he said. "They never work. I have to go get some Alka-Seltzer."

Charles closed the screen door behind him and wandered listlessly onto the porch in his red-striped bathrobe. "What you need," he said, "is an ice-cream float."

"You and your ice-cream floats."

"They work, I tell you. It's very scientific. Cold things are good for nausea and-"

"You're always saying that, Charles, but I just don't think it's true."

"Would you just listen to me for a second? The ice cream slows down your digestion. The Coke settles your stomach and the caffeine cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy. And besides, it makes you metabolize the alcohol faster. It's the perfect food."

"Go make me one, would you?" said Bunny.

"Go make it yourself," said Charles, suddenly irritable.

"Really," Francis said, "I think I just need an Alka-Seltzer."

Henry-who had been up, and dressed, since the first wink of dawn-came down shortly, followed by a sleepy Camilla, damp and flushed from her bath, and her gold chrysanthemum of a head curled and chaotic. It was almost two in the afternoon. The greyhound lay on its side, drowsing, one chestnut-colored eye only partly closed and rolling grotesquely in the socket.

There was no Alka-Seltzer, so Francis went in and got a bottle of ginger ale and some glasses and ice and we sat for a while as the afternoon got brighter and hotter. Camilla-who was rarely content to sit still but was always itching to do something, anything, play cards, go for a picnic or a drive-was bored and restless, and made no secret of it. She had a book, but she wasn't reading; her legs were thrown over the arm of her chair, one bare heel kicking, with obstinate, lethargic rhythm, at the wicker side. Finally, as much to humor her as anything, Francis suggested a walk to the lake. This cheered her instantly. There was nothing else to do, so Henry and I decided to go along. Charles and Bunny were asleep, and snoring in their chairs.

The sky was a fierce, burning blue, the trees ferocious shades of red and yellow. Francis, barefoot and still in his bathrobe, stepped precariously over rocks and branches, balancing his glass of ginger ale. Once we got to the lake he waded in, up to his knees, and beckoned dramatically like Saint John the Baptist.

We took off our shoes and socks. The water near the bank was a clear, pale green, cool over my ankles, and the pebbles at the bottom were dappled with sunlight. Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, an old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting. A wind rustled through the birches, blowing up the pale undersides of the leaves, and it caught in Camilla's dress and billowed it out like a white balloon. She laughed, and smoothed it down quickly, only to have it blow out again.

The two of us walked near the shore, in the shallows barely covering our feet. The sun shimmered off the lake in bright waves-it didn't look like a real lake but a mirage in the Sahara. Henry and Francis were further out: Francis talking, gesticulating wildly in his white robe and Henry with his hands clasped behind his back, Satan listening patiently to the rantings of some desert prophet.

We walked a good distance around the lake's edge, she and I, then started back. Camilla, one hand shading her light-dazzled eyes, was telling me a long story about something the dog had done-chewing up a sheepskin rug that belonged to the landlord, their efforts to disguise and finally to destroy the evidence-but I wasn't following her very closely: she looked so much like her brother, yet his straightforward, uncompromising good looks were almost magical when repeated, with only slight variations, in her. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.

I was looking at the side of her face, listening to the sweet, throaty cadences of her voice, when I was jolted from my musing by a sharp exclamation. She stopped.

"What is it?"

She was staring down at the water. "Look."

In the water, a dark plume of blood blossomed by her foot; as I blinked, a thin red tendril spiraled up and curled over her pale toes, undulating in the water like a thread of crimson smoke.

"Jesus, what did you do?"

"I don't know. I stepped on something sharp." She put a hand on my shoulder and I held her by the waist. There was a shard of green glass, about three inches long, stuck in her foot just above the arch. The blood pulsed thickly with her heartbeat; the glass, stained with red, glittered wickedly in the sun.