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villages and through broad marshes. A pale phosphorescence, as of something dead come back to uneasy life, now and then glowed far off in the marshes.
    He came to Beaswick in the dark, at ten o’clock at night. The village was a mean affair of ugly row houses interspersed with pubs and chip shops. In ten minutes he had passed through it, still following his map.
    A few minutes later he came to an unmarked road that led into a darkness of massive oaks. He drove through an iron gate opened onto a drive that went looping through the monumental trees. He rounded a final curve and saw before him an immense white house at the top of a wide flight of steps. Behind the house his headlights shone upon a descending series of terraces before they flashed across the windows of the house. Standish pulled up before the steps and got out of his car. When he took his first long look at Esswood House, an entirely unforeseen thing happened to him. He fell in love with it.

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    S tandish had never been to France or Italy, he had never seen Longliet, Hardwick Hall, Wilton House, or any of the twenty country estates that were Esswood’s equal; it would have made no difference if he had. Esswood struck him as perfect. The clear symmetrical line of the house, broken regularly by great windows, delighted him. He tried to remember the name for a facade like this, but the word would not come. It did not matter. The whole great white structure seemed balanced, in harmony with itself and the countryside around it. What might have been forbidding—the whiteness and severity of its facade, the flight of steps that might have reminded him of a government building—had been humanized by constant use. A single family, the Seneschals, had lived here for hundreds of years. People had moved familiarly up and down these steps and through every one of the rooms. Generations of children had grown up here. Even in the darkness the stairs showed worn patches, eroded by generations of Seneschals and hundreds of poets and painters and novelists. Here and there the paint was flaking, and water damage had left dark linear stains at the corners of some of the noble windows. These small blemishes did not disturb Esswood’s perfection.
    Standish opened the trunk of the car and lifted out two of his large suitcases. They seemed much heavier than they had in Zenith, and Standish dropped them one after the other onto the gravel before he closed his trunk. Then he picked them up and trudged toward the staircase.
    Someone in the house heard the sounds he made as he struggled toward the door. A light passed down the row of dark windows at the front of the house and moved toward the door. Standish wondered if a servant girl were rushing toward Esswood’s main entrance with a lighted candle, as would have happened centuries earlier. Would they still have servant girls, he wondered, and then began to wonder if he should be using the main entrance. There had to be an entrance at ground level, probably beside the staircase or off to the side of the house, where he had seen a trellised arbor. He grunted and hauled the two big suitcases up onto the terrace atop the steps. The massive, heavily ornamented door opened onto a blaze of light and color, and a woman in a well-cut gray pin-striped suit with a tight-fitting skirt stepped back, smiling to welcome him in. She appeared to be about his own age or slightly older, with long loosely bound hair and an intelligent hawklike face with bright animated eyes.
    Anxiety and surprise undid him. He said, “Is this the right door? Did I come to the right place?”
    â€œMr. Standish,” the woman said. Her voice was warm and soothing. “We’ve been wondering where you might be. Please come in.”
    He fell another notch deeper into infatuation with Esswood.
    â€œI’ve been wondering where I might be, too,” he said, and thought he saw a flash of approval in her lively eyes. Then he ruined