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Tommie jerks around. All he can see is the sun glinting through the tall pines across the road and a lone osprey winging toward the river. It feels colder than when he started out. “No, I’m not keen on her,” says Tommie. “Why?”
    “Her father was asking about you.”
    “Her father? When?”
    “I saw him over in King William, market day. He thought I was you, or else he got our names mixed up. He said, ‘You been shunning me, Tommie?’ And I said I’m Willie, the older brother. Tommie’s the ugly one. But he’s not much on funnin’—he just gave me a squint-eyed kind of look and said, ‘Well, you tell your brother he’s mighty high on his horse. If he thinks he’s too good for me and my daughter, he’s wrong. It’s the other way around.’ ”
    “That old coot. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I haven’t seen her since, gosh, it must’ve been last fall, before she went off to Bath.”
    Sunlight glances off the sides of their faces as they walk up the field, their lungs filled with the smells of manure fertilizer and freshly turned earth. “But you’ve heard from her,” Willie asks.
    “Nothing more than the letters she sends to Aunt Jane. Honestly, I don’t know anything more about her than you do. You know I was sweet on her for a while there after you and she … but nothing came of it. Nothing at all, and then she went off up to the mountains. I don’t know what her father means. Maybe she wrote him something, but she never says boo to him. You know that.” Why now, Tommie thinks, when they never talk about her?
    Willie shields his eyes with his hat brim, trying to see into his brother’s eyes. “Shad are running,” he says, just to say something, though doubting he’ll get much interest.
    “Maybe I’ll go out with you,” Tommie says. The brothers walk on together, Willie talking about how he’s gotten all his beets and carrots and potatoes planted but hasn’t quite finished the oats yet on account of a bent harrow. All around, the cultivated fields running to the lines of woods have a serenity and a timeless feel that give strength and confidence to Willie—the solid ground underfoot is reassuring in its promise of work and food. A barred owl makes a scratchy echo out in the distant woods, and clouds are gathering from the west.
    “What is it?” Willie says, looking at his brother. “Goose fly over your grave?”
    “No, that owl gives me the shivers.”
    Willie laughs, slapping his brother in the shoulder. “Four years of college and you’re more superstitious than I ever was.”
    In the morning Tommie takes Aunt Jane’s dappled gray to Upper Oaks to call on the Brays. It doesn’t seem so long ago when he rode along here in Lillie’s company, before he was engaged to Nola Bray. He was going up there to court Nola, and Lillie was still living at Aunt Jane’s. She was heading off to her tutoring when Tommie overtook her in the road. He had just returned from law school and Lillie was saucy with him, not nearly as respectful and awestruck as the girls at church for instance. Of course, by then she was almost like a sister, but she could annoy him in ways he thought no sister could have. He does not remember what she said now, only that he seemed to have offended her in some way and that as she, flush-faced, trotted away from him he noticed how her blouse stuck with sweat to a spot on her back and the ribbon on her hat bobbed as she posted. While visiting Nola that time he could not stop thinking about Lillie, the spot on the small of her back and the curve of her calf visible through her skirt.
    Now he lets himself in the front gate and rides up the horseshoe drive, past the white pillared portico, where the stableboy takes his horse. And he beholds again the finest house remaining in the lower part of the county, its Georgian symmetry and grace a statement of aristocratic refinement since well before the war. The Brays’ butler ushers Tommie back to Mr.