After Mark left, Lorna began moving around her kitchen, following her accustomed patterns, clearing the dishes, washing them. Herb went through the house in his accustomed pattern, turning lights off, turning the radio off, locking the doors. Everything they did was familiar, habitual. But tonight there was something odd about all this homely activity. ...

     In the back of Mark’s mind, he knew — or at least he had some kind of hunch — that Herb and Lorna were the people he wanted to — needed to — talk to, and so he visited them often. As Studebaker’s fortunes fell, Herb spent less and less time at the showroom and more and more time at home, tinkering, so the chances were good that he would be at home whenever Mark dropped by. ...

OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, while Herb and Lorna’s financial problems deepened, Mark saw them fairly often. Sometimes he would see them at my house when they were visiting. More often, though, Mark walked to their house specifically to visit them. The Glynns lived near Herb and Lorna, so Mark often headed for No Bridge Road after seeing Margot and Martha or after finding that the girls weren’t at home when he called. ...

     Mark was sitting on the living room sofa with his right arm around Margot and his left arm around Martha, when Herb and Lorna, who had come in through the kitchen, suddenly appeared in the archway between their dining room and their living room. His first impulse was to jump up and thank them, he felt such a rush of gratitude. ...

In Which Herb and Lorna Are Saved by the Art of Love: THEN I THREW A PARTY at Herb and Lorna’s house, and at that party Mark Dorset fell in love with the Glynn twins, and, therefore, everything turned out all right, eventually. ...

IN THOSE DIFFICULT YEARS, Studebaker’s declining years, Herb and Lorna had much to worry about, and worrying changed them. I didn’t notice the change; during those years I passed from childhood into adolescence, and I was far too interested in the ways that I was changing to notice what was happening to them. ...

     “I finished some pieces anyway,” said Lorna, “but they weren’t very good, and while I was working I began to see that there was another problem. I wasn’t going to be able to bring myself to sell them. My face would get flushed and my hands would start shaking whenever I even imagined selling them. Where on earth would I find people to buy them? Not ‘people.’ Women. It would have to be women. Can you imagine me showing them to men? ...

THE ESSENCE of the Piper failing was a tendency to let the heart rule the mind. We all suffer from this disease at some times, to some degree. It has consequences other than bad investments. It makes some of us write books and compose music and paint pictures. It makes some of us try to restore two-hundred-year old wooden houses or twenty-year-old British sports cars. It makes some of us fall in love. ...

     When the Spotters bought, the price of Studebaker stock was low, Studebaker sales were low, and the company had debts of more than fifty million dollars. When the Lark was released, the picture began to change. Larks sold. Studebaker stock rose. The company moved into the black. The Spotters did well. They did so well that, secretly, each began buying more stock on his own. ...

     On one of the Club evenings, divorced from Lorna’s cautious skepticism, Herb succumbed to the Piper failing. He let himself be convinced that the Spotters’ buying a few shares of stock was an undertaking free of risk, since they would only invest money that they had already lost. That was the essence of the argument advanced by Bob Schoop, who proposed the venture. ...