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away without seeing them. But he could certainly turn them away after token greetings.
    Annoyed, he told Arnold to show them in. He stood up, his back to the fire, and waited for them. Arnold ushered the young couple in. They looked ill at ease. The young man came forward with forced joviality, hand extended. “I’m Joe Preston, Doc. I guess we’re related.”
    Tomlin took the hand and released it quickly. “Distantly, I believe.” He did not like the look of Preston. He had a weak, narrow face. His sideburns were long and the dark hair was long above his ears, combed heavily back. He wore a ranch shirt and jeans with the belt buckled on the side.
    “You’ve got a nice place here, Doc. This is Laurie, my wife.”
    “Forgive me, but I detest being called Doc, if you don’t mind.” He nodded at the girl, half smiling. She stood just inside the doorway, her body tense, unsmiling. She was of medium height, sturdy in her cotton skirt and light sweater. Her hair was brown and sun streaked, her face broad but pretty, lightly freckled.
    “Come on, Joe!” she said with quiet firmness. “Come on!”
    “Wait up, honey. We only just got here.”
    “I want to leave right now. He doesn’t want us here. He didn’t answer the letter. You can see by the way he acts. Don’t be so …”
    “Hold it!” Joe Preston snapped.
    Dr. Tomlin found himself liking the girl on sight. There was something about the way she stood, something about the strength in her face and her eyes that reminded him of his long-dead wife when she had been a young girl.
    He smiled and heard himself saying, “Yes, please to ‘hold it.’Won’t you both sit down, please?”
    “See?” Joe said to Laurie and sat down before she did, sighing expansively, legs spread, elbows hooked on the chair arms.
    The girl sat on the edge of a straight chair.
    “Are you on your way through?” Tomlin asked.
    “I thought I’d look around right here,” Joe said. He made an expansive gesture. “The West Coast is shot. Too full of people. All crawling over each other trying to find jobs. This looks like a better deal, Doc … Doctor. For a while we didn’t think the old heap was going to make it, but it got us all the way across the U. S. and A., didn’t it, baby?”
    The girl nodded. She looked at the doctor and blushed and looked away. The doctor thought, with some surprise,
she is sensitive. This is embarrassing her. She knows what he is and what he’s doing and she doesn’t like it.
    In that moment he became curious about Laurie. It was as though some buried and forgotten part of him awakened. It was a painful rebirth. The death of his wife and child had been a blow from which he had never entirely recovered. He had wanted solitude, and found it. For years he had lost himself in work. Since retirement he had lived apart here in the stone house, with books and music and memories of a past so distant that now the memories were fragile, soft-hued, like the dry brown flowers pressed in old books. He waited patiently for death in the old house. He was both resentful of and intrigued by his stir of interest in the girl.
    He heard himself say, “You two could stay here for a little bit while you look around. A few days.” He heard Arnold’s astonished grunt in the dimness of the hallway beyond the study.
    “That’s damn white of you, Doc … tor.”
    “We appreciate it very much,” the girl said in a low voice.
    That was the way it had started. And the two of them had lived in the house ever since. And he was not sorry. Not for one minute had he been sorry. In the beginning Arnold had grumbled as much as he dared about the extra work. But as Laurie took over more and more of Arnold’s unwelcome duties, thatcomplaint faded away.
    Joe Preston was no good. On his regular trips to town to “hunt up a job,” he managed to return dulled by beer, steps heavy on the stairs. He had no conversation, and only the most rudimentary manners. Some stirrings of