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 dance or a corn husking or on horseback to a picnic or a rally, she thought surely we were doing something that youngsters had never done before, and that perdition was yawning wide for us. Maybe it was, for all I know. Anyway, I’m unhappy about Lolly. She seemed to me to have something on her mind that she wouldn’t tell me, and that isn’t all.

“I am free to admit that if the Bee Master doesn’t survive this operation and come back to his home and his neighbours, the rest of this world is going to be decidedly tasteless to me. We’ve lived here, side by side, for a good many years. I’ve come over and helped him fix up his place, and he’s been over and helped me fix up mine, and when the young folks would go away in the evening and the time dragged, he’d come over and we’d play cribbage or checkers. I never had brains enough to play chess so it would interest him. Sometimes I’d come over here and he’d sit there by the fire and read aloud from some of those fine old books.” She paused and looked at Jamie. “Are you familiar,” she asked, “with Donne’s ‘Devotions’?”

Jamie nodded.

“They were in my father’s library,” he said, “but nobody even thought to save his books for me. He died while I was in the war, and Mother had gone not long before, and they sold everything, not even a scrap of clothing or furniture did any of the neighbours save for me. Donne’s ‘Devotions’ went with the rest. I don’t know where, and I was too sick to search, and I hadn’t the