"You got something against them other branches?" Mr. Monk's voice was honey sweet. "Oh-h-h, you don't like their company. Well, I understand. You're just some kind of loner, keepin' away from the bunch like that." Then suddenly he roared, "Pride! That's your trouble! And I got a cure for pride!" Click! "There!"

Jonathan squatted beside the wall of hedge, not daring to move, uncertain of the direction of Mr. Monk's voice. There was a long silence. Then he. began to picture himself, cringing at the thought of meeting his groundsman. He smiled, shook his head, and stood up.

"What you doin', Dr. Hemlock?" Mr. Monk asked from directly behind him.

"Oh! Well! Hello." Jonathan frowned and dug his toe into the turf. "This—ah—this grass here, Mr. Monk. I've been examining it. Looks funny to me. Don't you think so?"

Mr. Monk had not noticed, but he was always willing to believe the worst of growing things. "Funny in what way, Dr. Hemlock?"

"Well, it's... greener than usual. Greener than it ought to be. You know what I mean."

Mr. Monk examined the area near the shrubbery, then compared it with nearby grass. "Is that right?"

His eyes grew round with rage as he turned on the offending patch.

Jonathan walked down the alley with determined casualness and turned at the first corner. As he paced more quickly to the house, he heard Mr. Monk's voice from within the labyrinth.

"You stupid weeds! Always screwing up! If you ain't brown and scruffy, you're too green! Well, this'll fix you!" Snip!

Jonathan drove along the tree-lined road to the station. The train would probably be late, in the Long Island tradition, but he could not run the risk of keeping Jemima waiting. His automobile was a vintage Avanti—a car consonant with his hedonistic lifestyle. It was in poor condition because he drove it hard and gave it little attention, but its line and grace appealed to him. When it finally broke down for good, he intended to use it as a planter on his front lawn.

He parked close to the platform, his bumper touching the gray, weathered planking. The warming sun liberated a smell of creosote from the wood. Because it was Sunday, the platform and the parking area were deserted. He leaned back in the seat and waited drowsily. He would never consider standing on a train platform to wait because...

...Henri Baq had bought his on the cement arrival dock of the Gare St. Lazare. Jonathan often thought of the steamy clangor of that vast steel-domed station. And of the monstrous grinning clown.

Henri had been off guard. An assignment had just ended, and he was going on his first vacation without his wife and children. Jonathan had promised to see him off, but he had been delayed in the tangle of traffic in the Place de L'Europe.

He caught sight of Henri, and they waved over the heads of the crowd. It must have been just then that the assailant slipped the knife into Henri's stomach. The dispatcher's voice boomed its undecipherable drone into the hiss of steam and rattle of baggage wagons. By the time Jonathan pushed his way through the throng, Henri was leaning against a huge poster for the Winter Circus.

"Qu'as-tu?"Jonathan asked.

Henri's drooping Basque eyes were infinitely sad. He clutched the front of his jacket with one hand, the fist pressed against his stomach. He smiled foolishly and shook his head with an I-don't-believe-it expression, then the smile contorted into a grin of pain, and he slid to a sitting posture, his feet straight out before him like a child's.

When Jonathan stood up after feeling Henri's throat for pulse, he came face to face with the insane grin of the clown on the poster.

Marie Baq had not wept. She thanked Jonathan for coming to tell her, and she gathered the children together in another room for a talk. When they came back, their eyes were red and puffy, but none of them was still crying. The eldest boy—also Henri—assumed his role and asked Jonathan if he would care for an aperitif. He accepted, and later he took them across the street to a cafe for supper. The youngest, who did not really understand what had happened, ate with excellent appetite, but no one else did. And once the eldest girl made a snorting noise as the dike of her control broke, and she ran to the ladies' room.

Jonathan sat up that night over coffee with Marie. They talked of practical and fiscal matters across the kitchen table covered with oilcloth from which daydreaming children had picked flecks of plastic. Then for a long time there was nothing to talk about. Close to dawn she pushed herself out of the chair with a sigh so deep it whimpered. "One must continue to live, Jonathan. For the little ones. Come. Come to bed with me."

There is nothing so life-embracing as lovemaking. Potential suicides almost never do. Jonathan lived with the Baqs for two weeks, and each night Marie used him like medicine. One evening she said calmly, "You should go now, Jonathan. I don't think I need you anymore. And if we continued after I ceased to need you, that would be a different thing."

He nodded.

When the youngest son heard that Jonathan was going away he was disappointed. He had intended to ask Jonathan to take him to the Winter Circus.

Several weeks later, Jonathan learned that Miles Mellough had set up the assassination. Because Miles left CII at the same time, Jonathan had never been sure which side had ordered the sanction.

"Nice job of meeting the train," Jemima said looking in the window from the off-driver side.

He started. "I'm sorry. I didn't notice it come in." He realized how thin that sounded, considering the desolate platform.

As they drove toward his place, she trailed her hand out the window, cupping the wind aerodynamically, as children do. He thought she looked smart and fresh in her white linen dress with its high mandarin collar. She sat deep in the seat, either completely relaxed or totally indifferent.

"Are those the only clothes you brought?" he asked, turning his head toward her, but keeping his eyes on the road.

"Yes, sure. I'll bet you were expecting some night things discreetly carried in a brown paper bag."

"The bag could have been any color. I wouldn't have cared." He braked and turned into a side road, then backed onto the highway again.

"You forgot something?"

"No. We're going back to the village. To buy you some clothes."

"You don't like these?"

"They're fine. But they're not much for working in."

"Working?"

"Certainly. You thought this was a vacation?"

"What kind of work?" she asked warily.

"I thought you might enjoy helping me paint a boat."

"I'm being had."

Jonathan nodded thoughtfully.

They stopped at the only shop in the village open on Sundays, a spurious Cape Cod structure decorated with fishing nets and glass balls calculated to delight weekend tourists from the city. The proprietor was no taciturn Down Easter; he was an intense man in his mid-forties, tending slightly to weight, wearing a tight-fitting Edwardian suit and a flowing pearl gray ascot. When he spoke, he thrust his lower jaw forward and relished the nasal vowels with deliberate sincerity.

While Jemima was in the back of the store picking out some shorts, a shirt, and a pair of canvas shoes, Jonathan selected other things, accepting the proprietors' estimate of size. The advice was not given graciously; there was a tone of peevish disappointment. "Oh, about a ten, I guess," the proprietor said, then compressed his lips and averted his eyes. "Of course, it will change when she's had a few children. Her kind always does." His eyebrows were in constant motion, each independent of the other.

Jonathan and Gem had driven a distance when she said, "That's the first time I've been a victim of prejudice on those grounds."