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52  Now you know just what this place always makes me think of, and you thought of it, too, nearly all by yourself."

It was idle to pretend that this simple game had not established a bond between them. The world might have been young again, or they might have known each other since Marathon itself. For a moment they stood in the warm sunlight, with faces shining on each other, undisguised; then they began to climb toward the bare skyline of the heights, slipping on the yellow grass, scrambling, helping each other up the steep bank, happy as the encircling sunshine. The warm breeze followed them, sweet with pennyroyal crushed underfoot.

  On the height their footing changed to bare pink ledges with grass-grown intervals of thin earth. A spiked wall of dark firs and a little grove of white birches disappointed him by cutting off all view of Black Harbor 