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The trick will be to stay on top. Give that man an inch and I can forget all about the mile. He'll take it before I even realize what's happening."
    Zipp yawned and stretched out one paw to bat playfully at the dishrag.
    "I'm not sure you're on my side, Zipp."
    Two hours later Flint paused to lean on his rake and watch as the somewhat staid-looking Oldsmobile nosed out of the driveway and onto the main road that circled the water. Rani's car appeared to have been purchased with an eye for safety and utility. Flint guessed she was the type who never took chances when she drove and who wouldn't dream of buying herself a hot little sports car. He was coming to the conclusion that her vividly colored clothes constituted her chief outlet for the adventurous impulses that cropped up in her mind. She was a lady who didn't take undue risks.
    Rani was on her way to Reed Lake, the small town located at the north end of the large, meandering lake. She was going to do a little shopping and pick up her mail, she'd explained as she'd waved the keys at him on her way out to the car.
    Flint knew she was going to do more than that. He'd heard the phone ring in the living room earlier when he'd been working at the front of the house, and his intuition told him that the man who hadn't made it to dinner the night before had probably called to set up a lunch date in town. Flint wondered if she'd tell Mike Slater about her substitute guest. There was also the possibility she might not take Flint's presence seriously enough to bother explaining his presence to another man.
    Flint's fingers locked fiercely around the rake handle, and he went back to cleaning leaves out of the hedge. Quite suddenly nothing on earth was more important than having Rani Garroway take him seriously.
    He hadn't missed the amused disdain in her eyes that morning when she'd casually implied he shared a commitment problem with the rest of his sex. She seemed to think his past was ample evidence to support the implication. What really bothered him now was that he hadn't viewed his wandering life as a result of an inability to settle down or make a commitment. He knew it looked that way to other people, but it hadn't felt that way to him.
    Rani didn't understand, Flint told himself. She didn't know what it felt like to be driven all of your adult life by a restlessness that didn't allow any peace. She couldn't know the feelings of isolation and aloneness it brought, that sense of being completely on your own. After a while the knowledge that a man could depend on no one but himself became so much a part of him that he stopped trying to imagine any other way of living. He kept going; kept searching for something he couldn't name because he didn't seem to have any choice.
    Flint knew it wasn't a sense of wanderlust that had kept him on the move since his early twenties. It was something far more insidious and potentially destructive. It had to do with an odd kind of desperation, a feeling that out there , somewhere, lay the answers he was seeking, the end of his quest.
    It was strange. For a long time he hadn't consciously thought about the unnamed demons that drove him.
    Years ago he'd stopped trying to analyze and fight them. He'd come to accept them as a part of himself.
    He'd kept searching, even though he frankly admitted he didn't really know what he sought. Chasing legends became a way of chasing an elusive truth about himself.
    But last night when Rani had opened her door to him, everything had begun to change. It was as if his very isolated, very private world had shifted subtly on its axis. He'd crossed the threshold, had sat down in front of Rani's fire and had realized that things that had never been in focus for him were suddenly beginning to solidify.
    That morning he'd awakened with an overpowering hunger for pancakes. The chilled autumn morning, together with the tall, sunlit pines and peaceful lake, had demanded a breakfast of hot pancakes and real maple syrup.