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enough. Being married doesn't mean you never lift your arm."
    Angelo, for a moment uncertain, like a joking priest who has perhaps misjudged his company, laughed aloud in relief. "A patient some years ago told me that was the custom. He wanted to know if it wasn't a good idea medically. I told him it was a good idea cosmetically. That poor fellow's gone now. In fact his insides had been gone when he came here. I was afraid for a minute the rest of you had profited by his bad example."
    "Well, no," Lucas easily lied, "we try to keep up the old traditions."
    Angelo liked this, and they might have gone on and on, for the thought of corruption put a sinister bloom on the doctor's manner, but luckily for Lucas there was a distraction. The woman flapping her head across the aisle called "Miss. Miss." Angelo's ponderous eyes wavered, and heavily he pushed away from the desk.
    Lucas left the three-sided box--box no doubt for some the entry to smaller boxes, more intricate chairs, and the final straps beneath the violet bulbs--light-headed. Passing Grace, the nurse, he saw she was a beautiful girl of twenty or so, her body firm as a half-green apple. He seemed to skate through the white cones of the doomed, and felt himself, mirrored in the waterless eyes watching, a cruelly vital toad. He was so rejuvenated he played hooky, ignoring Dr. Duff's door and making no appointment.
     
    HIS WORDS with Amy, and the patch of frail grape cloth, reminiscent, in her quilt, had affected Hook poorly. Her speaking so plainly of death stirred the uglier humors in him. In the mid-mornings of days he usually felt that he would persist, on this earth, forever; that all the countless others, his daughter and son among them, who had vanished, had done so out of carelessness; that if like him they had taken each day of life as the day impossible to die on, and treated it carefully, they too would have lived without end and have grown to have behind them an endless past, like a full bolt of cloth unravelled in the sun and faded there, under the brilliance of unrelenting faith. Amy, with her sharp short view, had disrupted the customary tide of his toward-noon serenity. He consoled himself by contemplating the southeast horizon, where, in support of his prediction, luminous leaning cumulus clouds were constructing themselves.
    Not that the sun was diminished yet. On the meadow beyond the wall, low where Hook stood, a rabbit paused, a silhouette of two humps, without color. When the creature lifted his head his chest showed its sharp bulge, and a lilac redness was vivid within the contour of his translucent ear--as Hook saw him he had but one ear.
    In the wide darkness surrounding the constricted area Hook's eyes could focus on, stars began to dance. They shut off and on with electronic rapidity, midges of dazzlement, and when he sought to give them chase, they removed their field to a further fringe of the sky his eyes made, and with a disconcerting sensation of insubstantiality he realized he had been concentrating into the sun, and that he had had little sleep the night before. He retired early but slept little, waking at queer hours with the feeling of no time having elapsed. Hook shielded his spectacles with the cigar hand and moved the three steps to the wall. Once he had a hand placed on the abrasive tepid surface of a sandstone, he lowered his lids.
    The wall, its height slightly waving, like a box hedge, enclosed four and a fourth acres. On the north the rear of the stone barn served as a section of the wall, near a wide gap once for wagons, marked by two pillars, in the mortar of which the hinges of the double metal gates of the old estate were still fixed. There was a less wide entry, more for men than vehicles, also gateless now, at the front--the east--leading into the central gravel walk. On the northeast corner, nearest Andrews, a small gate was kept padlocked, though in the estate's days it had seldom been; Mr. Andrews had intended the wall