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Dubrovnik sooner, and more clearly, than either of us. My throat tightened at my daughter’s cheerful valor and my own crippling cowardice. And for my husband, who would not say what I knew: that he wanted with all his heart to stand on the sea wall of that old city with his daughter, and be her eyes, and let her be his.
    “We should go,” I said, around a great geyser of fear, in a voice that was not mine. “She’s right, there just isn’t any reason not to. This is silly. Enough is enough.”
    “I wouldn’t do that to you, Cat,” Joe said, and there was nothing in his voice but the old love. Old, a long love….
    “Joe….”
    “No. I wouldn’t. It would be like holding a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. What do you think I am?”
    “A fifty-year-old man who’s never been to Europe,” I said, and got up and went into the house and called Corinne Parker.

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    T “HERE ARE THESE BANDS OF GYPSY CHILDREN, REALLY small kids, who roam the streets like packs of orphan puppies; they dress in rags and come up to you in tears, begging for money, and while your heart is breaking and you’re fishing for your wallet, one of them slips around behind you and picks your pocket. Or else they swoop down on you from behind, so quietly you don’t even hear them coming, and just snatch your purse and are two blocks away before you realize what hit you. They’re all over Rome. Nobody seems able to stop them. Of course, in Rome, nobody tries very hard.”
    Hays Bennett, who was president of the Faculty Council that year and Joe’s number-two man in the department, took a deep swallow of his gin and tonic and grinned his vulpine grin around the room. He had a sharp face and a brush of red hair and looked like a fox. Of all our friends, I was least comfortable with Hays. He always looked as though he halfway meant the sly barbs with which he larded his conversation. Probably he did
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    HILL TOWNS / 37
    not; Joe always said he didn’t. But he was the only one of our usual party crowd who teased me about never leaving the Mountain, and he did it so often I did not think it was casual or coincidental. He was looking at me now. I knew the story of the gypsy children was aimed like an arrow at me. Colin and Maria had just asked Joe and me to meet them in Rome in July, where they were to be married, and everyone at our party had been babbling in excitement over the proposed trip. My silence had not escaped Hays.
    “They sound awful,” I said truthfully. They did; the notion of that silent swarming pack bursting around me without warning, snatching, grabbing, was repellent to me, appalling.
    But I spoke lightly.
    “Oh, they never hurt anybody, except accidentally,” Hays said. “They’re after your money, not your life. Not like on the San Diego Freeway or even Atlanta. Italians are not really into bodily harm. Would you rather be mugged or murdered than surprised?”
    “Cat would,” Joe said lazily from the sofa, where he was sprawled with his bourbon and soda. I turned to look at him in surprise and the sort of swift, small shock of hurt you feel when a beloved child or a pet lashes out at you. Joe knew how I felt about Hays’s needling.
    “Almost, I would,” I said, smiling. “Death before stealth.”
    The small group in the living room laughed; Joe and Hays laughed with them.
    “Who wouldn’t? There’s no redeeming social value in being scared to death,” Corinne Parker said, grinning briefly and looking closely at me, and everyone laughed again, and the moment and the party flowed on.
    It was a pretty party, a good one. Ours almost always were. I knew that I had a knack for bringing people together in easy groups, and I had honed it by determi 38 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    nation and repetition into an art. I liked the deep sense it gave me of nurturing, of caring for and making happy the people whose lives were intertwined with ours. After twenty-three years, most Trinitarians and much of the village and the