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here with me, even when you were not.
    Then they both saw that something deep and terrible had happened. But they did not know how to fix it, or even how to name it.
    The mark on Loren’s wrist remained. The money he had made was enough to continue their life for a very long time without his going away. Yet still, he would go down into the meadow past the house, where a narrow path wound through trees to a brook, and the Cassila, with its flowering branches raves in good pleasure all through the spring, and even there, there with the bouquet of scent, the dazing pleasuring sunlight, the rushing swiftness of the brook, and the standing comfort of the grasses, he felt at his core the beginnings of a slight terror. It was then he would turn to the house and would see, or hear from afar, as though he were near, the sound of Ilsa’s love-making as she lay with another man, the sound of her calling out, the rustling of sheets, the noise of skin and skin.
    He would rush, blue veined in anger, up the stairs, to find her at needlework by a window, or weaving in the parlor. Yet there would be to her then some slight disarray, a looseness to her hair, a flush to her lips, a half-buttoned dress or an uncaught breath, that to him would cement all his fears.
    In his dreams, both waking and sleeping, he was forced to watch as different men, not just the merchant, but others, came to his wife, and she to them. Finally Loren’s angers grew too great, and Ilsa fled the house in the company of a friend she knew only slightly, a girl she had encountered once, the supposed daughter of woman she knew. They fled to a nearby village, pursued by Loren, and took shelter in the uppermost room of an inn.
    Loren rode that day desperately after her. He remembered how it had been in what seemed now like their youth. He thought of her gentleness, her tenderness with him always, and how quick she had been in thought, yet always thinking of him. And as he rode, his anger softened, and he felt in his heart that he had wronged her. Yet then by chance his eye passed over the reins and over his wrist and he beheld there the raging mark, the burn of which he felt still, and with it his anger grew.
    He made his way into the town and cast his luck in the air. It sent him to the inn. He tied his horse to a pole, threw open the door, and entered. A great many people were in the common room. A young man in a blue-gray suit. A woman with a fan. An old man whose age lay all about his feet, and a tall man tall with a broad, kind face, a black beard, black eyes and hair, a dog on hind legs holding a violin. The black-bearded man took Loren by the shoulder. He said,
    —You think that by going upstairs, the world will continue. But there is more to it than that. He wants to go upstairs, said the man, pointing to the young fellow in the blue-gray suit, but he isn’t going. He’s staying right here. You sit here a moment.
    Loren sat. His mind was in a seething fury.
    The young man in the blue-gray suit came over and patted him on the shoulder.
    —My friend, he said, this is for you.
    He pressed an orange into Loren’s hand. But it was not just any orange. It was the orange that Loren had been about to eat when news had come to him of his parents’ death. How had the orange been preserved so long? How could it still be fresh? Yet it was. Loren peeled the orange, and it was as perfect a fruit as he had ever seen. He took a portion and put it in his mouth, and the taste filled him. It was full of freshness and new promise, the lifting of obligation. He gave pieces of the orange to everyone in the room, and they all ate, smiling.
    The young man knelt by Loren and whispered in his ear:
    —Though we pass away now, the world will return to you again; fear not.
    For at that moment the black-bearded blacksmith began to speak, and all that he said became more and more certain until only his subject remained.
    —I heard tell once, he was saying, of a guess artist. He lived in a