She wondered if Daniel ever wondered whether they were in love; or whether they would be, some day. She wondered if she could get up the nerve to ask him, and what he would say if she did, for he could hardly come right out and say no, the thought had never crossed his mind. While she was still in the midst of her wonderings, there he was, with his bicycle, on the raked gravel of the crescent. The first snowflakes of the year were alighting on his beautiful black hair. His nose and forehead, his cheekbones and his chin were straight out of the most arrogantly lovely Ghirlandaio in all the museums of the world.

“Daniel!” she called out, bounding down the steps, and from the way he smiled at her in reply she thought that maybe it was possible that they were already in love. But she understood, as well, that it would be wrong to ask, or even to wonder.

Grandison Whiting was a tall, spare-limbed, thin-faced, pilgrimish man who stood in violent contradiction to his own flamboyantly bushy beard, a beard of the brightest carrot-orange, a beard that any pirate could have gloried in. His suit was puritanically plain, but across the muted check of the waistcoat hung a swag of gold chain so heavy as to seem actually serviceable in conjunction, say, with manacles or fetters. And glinting within the cuffs of his coat were cufflinks blazoned with diamonds larger than any that Daniel had ever seen, even in the windows of the Des Moines branch of Tiffany’s, so that he seemed to wear, not his heart, but his checkbook on his sleeve.

His manners and accent were uniquely, unnaturally his own; neither English nor Iowan, but a peculiar hybrid of both that preserved the purr of the former and the twang of the latter. You would have felt almost guilty to say that you liked such a person as Grandison Whiting, but for all that Daniel didn’t positively dislike him. His strangeness was fascinating, like the strangeness of some exotic bird illustrated in a book of color plates, a heron or an ibis or a cockatoo.

As to the nest that this rare bird inhabited, Daniel was in no such state of equivocation. All of Worry made Daniel uncomfortable. You couldn’t walk on the carpets or sit on the chairs without thinking you’d do them some damage. And of all the rooms that Daniel had been taken through, Grandison Whiting’s drawing room, where they’d come at five for tea, was, if not the grandest, surely the most elegantly perishable. Not that Daniel, by this time, was still making sharp distinctions among the degrees of bon ton. It was all equally unthinkable, and hours ago he’d closed his mind to any but the simplest sense of having to resist the various intimidations of so much money. If you once allowed yourself to admire any of it — the spoons, the cups, the sugar bowl, the exquisite creamer filled with cream as thick and gloppy as mucilage — where would you stop? So he shut it out: he took his tea without sugar or cream and passed up all the cakes for one dry curl of unbuttered toast.

No one urged him to change his mind.

After they’d been introduced all round and the weather had been deplored, Grandison Whiting asked Daniel what he had thought of the harpsichord. Daniel (who’d been expecting a genuine antique, not a modern reconstruction built in Boston forty years ago) replied, guardedly, that it was nothing like a piano, that the touch, and the two manuals, would take some getting used to. What he’d said at the time, to Boa, was “Weird”; what he hadn’t said, even to her, was that the Steinway grand was as far beyond his ken as the harpsichord (or as the harp, for that matter), just as weird, in the sense of being wholly and unsettlingly beautiful.

Then Boa’s sister Alethea (in a white dress as stiff and resplendent as the table napkins) asked him how, in the wilderness of Amesville, he had managed to take piano lessons. He said he was self-taught, which she must have suspected was less than the whole truth, for she insisted: “Entirely?” He nodded, but with a smile meant to be teasing. She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks. Daniel wondered if she weren’t actually the more interesting of the two sisters: interesting as an object, like some dainty cup with flowers painted on it in microscopic details, or like an armchair with golden legs carved into watery shapes, with that same eggshell elegance, the same intrinsic, unhesitating disdain for boors, bears, clods, and paupers like himself, which Daniel found (somewhat guiltily) arousing. Boa, by contrast, seemed just another person, a contender in the sweepstakes of growth and change, who sometimes would pull ahead of him, sometimes fall behind. No doubt the family money was in her blood as much as it was in Alethea’s, but its effect on her was problematical, whereas with Alethea it was as though the money had blotted out everything else: as though she were the form that money took translated into flesh and blood — no longer a problem, just a fact.

Alethea went on, with wonderful aplomb considering that no one seemed interested, about horses and riding. Her father listened abstractedly, his manicured fingers patting the tangles of his fantastic beard.

Alethea fell silent.

No one took the initiative.

“Mr. Whiting,” said Daniel, “was it you I spoke to earlier, when I was at the gatehouse?”

“I’m sorry to have to say it was. Candidly, Daniel, I hoped I might just wriggle out of that one. Did you recognize my voice? Everyone does, it seems.”

“I only meant to apologize.”

“Apologize? Nonsense! I was in the wrong, and you called me down for it quite properly. Indeed, it was then, hanging up the phone and blushing for my sins, that I decided I must have you come to tea. Wasn’t it, Alethea? She was with me, you see, when the alarm went off.”

“The alarms go off a dozen times a day,” Boa said. “And they’re always false alarms. Father says it’s the price we have to pay.”

“Does it seem an excess of caution?” Grandison Whiting asked rhetorically. “No doubt it is. But it’s probably best to err on that side, don’t you think? In future when you visit you must let us know in advance, so that we may shut off the scanner, or whatever they call it. And I sincerely hope you will return, if only for Bobo’s sake. I’m afraid she’s been feeling rather… cut-off?… since she came back from the greater world beyond Iowa.” He raised his hand, as though to forestall Boa’s protests. “I know it’s not for me to say that. But one of the few advantages of being a parent is that one may take liberties with one’s children.”

“Or so he claims,” said Boa. “But in fact he takes all the liberties he can, with whoever allows it.”

“It’s nice of you to say so, Bobo, since that gives me leave to ask Daniel — you will allow me to call you Daniel, won’t you? And you must call me Grandison.”

Serjeant snickered.

Grandison Whiting nodded toward his son, by way of acknowledgement, and continued: “To ask you, Daniel (as I know I have no right to), Why have you never had that terrible apparatus removed from your stomach? You’re quite entitled to, aren’t you? As I understand it — and I’ve had to give the matter some consideration, since officially I’m on the governing board of the state prison system — only convicts who are paroled, or who’ve committed much more… heinous crimes than yours—”

“Which isn’t,” Boa hastened to remind her father, “any crime at all, since the court’s decision.”

“Thank you, dear — that’s exactly my point. Why, Daniel, having been wholly exonerated, do you submit to the inconvenience and, I daresay, the embarrassment of the sort of thing that happened today?”

“Oh, you learn where the alarms are. And you don’t go back.”

“Pardon me, um, Daniel,” said Serjeant, with vague good will, “but I’m not quite following. How is it that you go about setting off alarms?”