"Were you sent along to spy on me?" I demanded.

His eyes hardened.

"Not you? Then who has been reporting to her?"

This question would never be answered satisfactorily, although for several years I suspected Mr. Peek whose daughters I had unintentionally insulted. He had been recently in France and having, as he was pleased to tell me, "gotten myself about," may have been the source. But this really made no sense for my mother would never have received an American of his type. Most likely, I had betrayed myself with my dissembling letters. My mother knew my heart was easily touched. She knew me judgmental but also passionate, my senses readily excited. If I had only had the wit to admire an American woman or two, if I had admitted a single intellect, a melodious voice or two, she may not have so clearly understood the love that I was hiding. As the Parrot coarsely observed when describing her intuition, "Your mother sniffed the fillies in the air."

In any case, the Comtesse de Garmont had somehow perceived her son's matrimonial intentions. As a result the game had reached a dangerous stage and I was delivered, quite unprepared, to that place above the cataract where life and death decisions must be made. There might still be time to catch a branch, but did I wish it?

Finding myself suffering considerable emotions I turned to stack the fire which had, as always at Old Farm, been neglected by the servants. The great logs being almost exhausted and the kindling in poor supply, I had excuse to make a considerable task of it but finally I must reveal my own eyes to my servant. He had folded his hands in front of his apron and I observed the crescents of red and yellow paint beneath his fingernails. Being irritated by these marks of absence, I set to get him back on track, to now take the dictation he had so much avoided.

"Now?" he inquired.

"Now," I ordered.

But even as I spoke, my mind was in another place. This tactic of the comtesse had forced me to confront myself. I loved Amelia Godefroy with all my heart. I would die rather than be parted from her-but she would be destroyed by noble France. I had been, so many evenings, drunk on the possibility of America, but was I in love with America or Amelia? In this-dear wild wonderful girl-she did not help me. For while I might wax rhapsodic about the simple direct democracy of a town meeting, it was Amelia who took furious issue with President Jackson and his treatment of the Indians. It was she who, affecting not to disturb my concentration, slipped papers beneath my library door. Had I answered these written pleas I would have had my nation prevent Jackson 's scheme to have all previous treaties with the Indians denied. I would also have departed for South Carolina that very morning. There I would learn what it was to spend all one's life, from first breath to last, in chains.

Was this what I wished to marry?

How could you not love the woman who wrote these lines? But if I married her, I would join the Union in every sense. Then would not Jackson 's crimes be mine as well?

In my own conversations with my beloved, all was turbulence, one moment tender kisses and the next the president was a tyrant and the next he was a brave and honest man who would remove the people's gold from the First United States Bank where it was being used to oppose the people's will.

My heart and mind were in turmoil, yet I could not cease my labor. I ignored the bell to lunch and my secretaire, although clearly agitated, did not demand his afternoon in Wethersfield. It was suppertime, and both our stomachs in chorus, when I bade him set the quill aside.

He begged permission to light a pipe-a new habit-and when he had his long legs backed hard against the fire, he announced that he must now travel to New York and could not be sure of his return.

I could not lose him now.

The job of work I had begun in America had its roots in the flinty soil of penal servitude. Had that not been my public intention, to come to Wethersfield to study the administration of the prison? But once here the prison seemed a minor task and what was growing in Connecticut was a second undertaking, and no matter what its author's lacks, his foreign ignorances, his inevitable confusions, I had reason to believe my study of America would stand for many years to come. It would act as map and compass to my countrymen as they negotiated the violent onset of democracy. What business was more important than this? Not Mr. Parrot's, certainly.

As to the engraving he showed me, I never saw so gaudy a thing and I was reminded of the painting of Thomas Cole-a tedious man-whose autumn landscape had already brought an alarming garishness to Mr. Godefroy's foyer. The colors of the American autumn are, in all their splendor, the most magical thing you ever saw, but they are of a very raw and independent nature, wild beasts in their way, creatures who will not permit themselves to be made tame in art. Indoors they are rude and gaudy-one wishes they had left their accordion and muddy boots outside-and that was the vulgar nature of this singular engraving that poor John Larrit, who had already suffered very much in his long life, now staked all his store on. It was nothing much more than a circus bird but he stood before me full of hope, like a boy in a fairy story, off to make his fortune in the world.

I had grown very fond of him and was exceedingly sad to witness his conceit.

"YOU HAVE LOST YOUR WIFE," Amelia said, flicking snow into my face. "It is weeks ago he left and you have been in mourning ever since."

"He is my servant, not my wife," I said, although of course I understood the joke. Also it was very true-he had ended up a very useful chap.

"Only a servant?" she said. "Then that's easily fixed. We'll get a new one."

She stooped to pick a small gray rock from the white crisp blanket at our feet.

"Your lordship's rock," said she, smiling to reveal that charming slender shadow between her two top teeth. Why was this apparent defect so entrancing?

"Shall I warm it for you, sir?" she asked, and proceeded to blow on the rock and hold it under her arm and I thought that tiny gap was really the master stroke in all her face, although how this absence could create such a sense of character, of liveliness, of blessed mischief was beyond my understanding. She was a Rembrandt not a Hals.

We had come to the long ridge of Gibson's Hill, named for a settler of living memory, and all of Old Farm was spread before me like a gift I might unwrap if so I chose, the snow-dusted onion fields, the cow pastures and woods, the idealistic cabins with their porches and, beyond these steep white roofs, the crooked elbow of the Connecticut River beside which I had wandered, in ignorance and love, not daring hope this day be granted me.

My darling was clad in sturdy tall boots and a long native bearskin coat, but on her head she wore the bright red bonnet she had adopted when the locals were still hunting deer. This framed a face that, in all its Greek perfection, recalled the Hygeia which stood on my father's desk, its secret life hidden behind her pale pink mouth which, applied with winter oil against the cold, glistened like those lips which made Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun such a favorite with Marie Antoinette.

"He has gone on to other things," she said. "You should be happy."

How could one not be content with this extraordinary beauty, this grand sweep of life and all the centuries that might be lived within the landscape now considered?

"Your Larrit," she said, "he will make a fortune, you will see."

"If I am sad it is not because I have lost a servant."

"Dear Olly," she said. "Don't be ashamed to miss him. I have observed the pair of you together. It is really rather sweet. You are a very noble noble, dear."