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now."
         "My life story?" he asked.
         "Of course," she answered lightly, "all of it."
         To her surprise—she had thought it to be no more than banter—he became serious.
         "I was not reared for any sort of working life," he began, and the way he spoke—a trifle pedantic—made her think that his speech was rehearsed. He went on, "My father did well in business, as perhaps you know. I was ill as a child and my parents—having lost four others—were understandably cautious about my health. I was left to my tutors and my daydreams."
         He shook his head, being careful not to frown. "One day for a reason I can no longer remember—we were at a farmhouse in New Hampshire. It was summer, and warm, and my tutor took me to read under a tree that was on the edge of a field. Men were working—harvesting, I think. I can still feel what I felt then, as I watched those men lifting and raking, the muscle ropes in their arms. I wanted to do what they were doing with all my heart. I envied those men more than I have ever envied anyone—before or since . . . the muscles, the sweat, the throat dry with dust from the fields. I even fancied I could feel the pleasure of physical exhaustion, when lying down at night. In that moment, I knew that I would not be confined to an office or a study, that if I couldn't work in the fields, I could at least find a way to be a part of the world, the movement, the active life rather than the passive."
         It was a long speech, and for most of it he had not been looking at her. Now he turned, as if coming back. "I surprised even myself, I think," he went on, "and I surprise myself now, talking on so as if I were the only subject in the world."
         She busied herself with the cutting of a plum cake, handing him a large slice on a napkin.
         "Tell me, now, how you happened to become so interested in hawks," he said. "It is your turn to confide."
         "First you tell me," she countered, purposefully, "what you would have done had you been disappointed in . . . Porter Farm?"
         He looked at her, chastened.
         "You remember," she went on, boldly, "you said that you felt comfortable here, and that it surprised you. What would you have done had you not felt comfortable?"
         "I don't know," he answered with surprising candor, "but it can't matter, can it? The fact is, I do feel comfortable with you. I am not disappointed, and I hope you are not, either."
          With you , he had said. No pretenses, no subterfuge. He was not disappointed in her and he felt confident enough of his own appeal to assume she was not disappointed in him. The lightness, the excitement Willa had felt when his shoulder pressed against hers was displaced by the weight of reality. Willa guessed that she was one of Owen Reade's calculated risks; she guessed, too, that his courting flight would be brief.
         "You asked about hawks, how I came to find them so interesting," she said, in answer. "Just as you remember the afternoon in New Hampshire, I remember the first time I sat and watched the flight of a hawk—truly watched, I mean. Pa had sent me out to find a cow and her calf that had become separated from the herd, and I had to go a long ways. On the way back I sat down to rest for a minute. I leaned against a fencepost—it was late in the evening, after milking—and looked up, and there against the sky was one of the biggest birds I had ever seen. At first I thought it to be a golden eagle. It was quartering—separating a field into sections, then moving methodically in large swooping circles until the whole of the field is covered—and now and then it would just hover, beating its wings in such a way as to stay in one place. I watched it for the longest time, and when I went home I searched through all of Grandmother's books until I found what it was—a rough-legged hawk. After that, for days, I could close my eyes and see that hawk soaring and