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 allowing his eyebrows to stretch themselves a little and pursing his lips gently to show attention. But the name meant nothing to him.

"I shouldn't wonder if she's on her way to the Island too. You remember, she was there one summer when we were all children. I wouldn't have known her, but I saw her picture in a magazine not long ago. She's some kind of artist, I think. She always was a queer kid."

Ben's recollection of old days on the Island was mostly limited to a strip of yellow shore. He remembered catboats and knife-edged grasses, a dock with barnacled piles, learning to make a half-hitch in wet ropes, and the freckled, gap-toothed faces of some other small boys. He remembered splintery plank walks among masses of poison ivy, the puckered white feet of a man who had been drowned, the sour stink of his aquarium of hermit crabs, dead because he forgot to change their water. He remembered an older boy who taught the small fry obscene rhymes. The cheerful disgusting hazards of being young were now safely over, thank goodness. The orderly exacting routine of business was enough to keep a man amused. Twenty-one years is a long time: yet turning the focus of memory a little more sharply he caught an unexpected glimpse of a friendly fat waitress at