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who reached out.
    “Dear lady,” he said, “you have been so kind.”
    “But,” she said, quietly, looking at him, waiting for him to truly see her, “I am not leaving.”

“You...?”

“I am going with you,” she said. “But your plans?”

“Have changed. Now, I have nowhere else to go.”
    She half-turned to look over her shoulder.
    At the dock, a swiftly gathering crowd peered down at
    someone lying on the planks. Voices murmured and cried out. The word “doctor” was called several times.
    The ghastly passenger looked at Minerva Halliday. Then he looked at the crowd and the object of the crowd’s alarm lying on the dock: a medical thermometer lay bro ken under their feet. He looked back at Minerva Halliday, who still stared at the broken thermometer.
    “Oh, my dear kind lady,” he said, at last. “Come.”
    She looked into his face. “Larks?” she said.
    He nodded and said, “Larks!”
    And he helped her up into the train, which soon jolted and then dinned and whistled away along the tracks toward London and Edinburgh and moors and castles and dark nights and long years.
    “I wonder who she was?” said the ghastly passenger looking back at the crowd on the dock.
    “Oh, Lord,” said the old nurse. “I never really knew.”
    And the train was gone.
    It took a full twenty seconds for the tracks to stop trembling.

One Night in Your Life

    He came into Green River, Iowa, on a really fine late spring morning, driving swiftly. His convertible Cadillac was hot in the direct sun outside the town, but then the green overhanging forests, the abundances of soft shade and whispering coolness slowed his car as he moved toward the town.
    Thirty miles an hour, he thought, is fast enough.
    Leaving Los Angeles, he had rocketed his car across burning country, between stone canyons and meteor rocks, places where you had to go fast because everything seemed fast and hard and clean.
    But here, the very greenness of the air made a river through which no car could rush. You could only idle on the tide of leafy shadow, drifting on the sunlight-speckled concrete like a river barge on its way to a summer sea.
    Looking up through the great trees was like lying at the bottom of a deep pool, letting the tide drift you. He stopped for a hotdog at an outdoor stand on the edge of town.
    “Lord,” he whispered to himself, “I haven’t been back through here in fifteen years. You forget how fast trees can grow!”
    He turned back to his car, a tall man with a sunburnt, wry, thin face, and thinning dark hair. Why am I driving to New York? he wondered. Why don’t I just stay and drown myself here, in the grass. He drove slowly through the old town. He saw a rusty 36 train abandoned on an old side-spur track, its whistle long silent, its steam long gone. He watched the people moving in and out of stores and houses so slowly they were under a great sea of clean warm water. Moss was everywhere, so every motion came to rest on softness and silence. It was a barefoot Mark Twain town, a town where childhood lingered without anticipation and old age came without regret. He snorted gently at himself. Or so it seemed.
    I’m glad Helen didn’t come on this trip, he thought. He could hear her now: “My God, this place is small. Good grief, look at those hicks. Hit the gas. Where in hell is New York?” He shook his head, closed his eyes, and Helen was in Reno. He had phoned her last night.
    “Getting divorced’s not bad,” she’d said, a thousand miles back in the heat. “It’s Reno that’s awful. Thank God for the swimming pool. Well, what are you up to?”
    “Driving east in slow stages.” That was a lie. He was rushing east like a shot bullet, to lose the past, to tear away as many things behind him as he could leave. “Driving’s fan.”
    “Fun?” Helen protested. “When you could fly? Cars are so boring.”
    “Goodbye, Helen.”
    He drove out of town. He was supposed to be in New York in five days to talk over the