Herb and Lorna and Mrs. Stolz sat in uneasy silence for a few minutes, and then Herb said, with great calm, “She probably won’t be long. She’ll be back in a while.” A couple of minutes passed. “It could take as long as an hour, I suppose,” said Lorna. “Really?” said Herb. “Do you think it’ll take that long? To learn the parts of the frog?” ...

     Dudley began helping Ella with her schoolwork. He was more intelligent and better informed than any of her teachers. He did a better job of explaining what she was required to know, and he did more than that: he took her beyond what the school taught her in every subject. Ella thought that Dudley was fascinating (“dreamy”) and extraordinary (“a man in a million”), and she fell in love with him. ...

IN THE SPRING of Ella’s sixteenth year (Herb’s forty-first, Lorna’s thirty-ninth), when Ella began to look more like a pretty young woman than a pretty young girl, Dudley Beaker, a bachelor for whom this was the spring of his twenty-eighth year, bought the house next door. Dudley was, for the neighborhood into which he had moved, something of an exotic. ...

     After a while, not even Herb really had any objection to Mrs. Stolz’s living with them. The ménage was a happy one, and he wouldn’t have done anything to disturb it. Within the first year, he had the den in habitable shape; Mrs. Stolz moved in, and Ella was able to sleep in the room that Herb and Lorna had intended for her. It took Herb another eight years to finish the den completely, but finally he did finish it, ...

     Except for Lorna’s work in the cellar, Mrs. Stolz found that Lorna behaved as if she were as normal as anyone else. Mrs. Stolz considered this a miracle. Every night since her return, she had fallen to her knees beside her bed and prayed for Lorna’s sanity, and it seemed to her that her prayers had been answered — at least there were no screaming fits or mad scenes. Mrs. Stolz tried not to give herself credit for Lorna’s relative sanity, but she had to admit to herself that it was, most likely, her calming presence, her maturity, her regular habits and set ways, that kept Lorna on an even keel.

HERB BEGAN work on the new room at once. He persisted in referring to it as “the den,” in the hope — which he never expressed in any other way, not through any dropping of hints, not through any irony or the slightest ambiguity in his tone of voice — that before he had actually finished the new room Mrs. Stolz would have decided that she’d really rather return to the River Sound Hotel, and the room would in fact become his den. For the time being, Mrs. Stolz slept in the room that had been intended for Ella, and Ella slept in the living room, on the rose-colored sofa. ...

     Mrs. Stolz was settled in her favorite chair, wrapped snugly in her old robe, eating, in small, luxurious bites, a chocolate cream from a box on the table beside her. A copy of Life was open in her lap, but she had stopped reading to watch the raindrops run down the window pane, and she was thinking how pleasant it was to be in such cozy quarters, in a place as snug as her old robe, a place that gave her so much comfort but asked so little of her, when Lorna and Herb knocked at her door.

     That night Lorna and Herb lay awake in the dark, each thinking about the house, trying to remember it precisely, imagining life there, and trying to be still about it, in order not to wake the other, but neither was breathing like a person asleep, and finally the thought of crocuses coming up in the little lawn in the spring became so vivid in Lorna’s mind’s eye that she giggled from the pleasure of it. ...

     In the western part of Babbington, the part they had first entered on that rainy night when they arrived from Chacallit, they found a house that suited them. It was on an unnamed street off Bay Way, the road that led from Main Street to the bay. At the corner of this unnamed street was a sign, erected by the Babbington Department of Public Works, a sign with a temporary look, not the job of a practiced sign painter. It said CAUTION NO BRIDGE. ...

     A coolness, a distance, had developed between May and Garth that made life at May’s less than pleasant. Lorna and Herb were always, awkwardly, in the middle, listening to the confidences of one or the other, trying to offer the right advice, trying to bring back the happiness that had been in the house not so long ago. ...