The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

highest or the lowest. To the lowest like a friend and to the highest like a king. I can still hear him when we had the store before he built the Mansion House. His voice would rattle the tinware on the ceiling.”
    Uncle Dick shook his head. He had heard the story many times before. He went back to his paper and Aunt Jess took Aunt Teresa by the hand.
    “Now I think you should go up to bed, Aunty. You’re tired. You took that long walk over Birds Hill today. Come along. I’ll see you to the stairs.” They disappeared slowly into the hall, where the caller could hear Aunt Teresa protesting she hadn’t brought her book. In a minute she wasback in the sitting room looking with surprise at the caller.
    “Why, Elijah! When did you come? I wondered where you were. And how is Palmyra and the children?”
    Aunt Jess hobbled laboriously into the room. Her eyes “looked daggers” (one of her own expressions) at the caller as if he were the cause of this trouble.
    “It isn’t Pap-pa, Aunty,” she repeated. “If you look at him closely you’ll see he looks no more like Pap-pa than the man in the moon.” She gave a triumphant glance at him as if to say, I hope that settles you. Taking Aunt Teresa by the arm, she got her back to the hall again. John Donner heard her rapping on the door to the other side of the house, and he knew she was calling Sally Houck, who would go upstairs and stay with Aunty till she was asleep.
    In her feathered hat and worn black silken coat Aunt Jess appeared again at the door.
    “I’m going, Dick,” she said and paused, her eyes hostile on the caller. “But first I think this man should tell us what trouble he claims Johnny is in.”
    “He isn’t in trouble yet, Mrs. Ryon. Not until the future.”
    She groaned, a trick of hers he had forgotten until now, a horrendous sound of protest and ridicule with which shegreeted anything preposterous. As a boy he had thought it amusing. Today he felt its sting.
    “What would you say if I told you that I knew Johnny’s future?” he asked.
    “I’d say you were cracked,” she said tartly.
    “Please, Mrs. Ryon. You can help me!” he begged. “You may even help Johnny although you won’t know it. Just talk to me a little about him. Tell me what faults he has, what mistakes he may have made that would make him want to come back here someday.”
    “Johnny has no more faults than the average boy and far less than most,” she informed him.
    “What about his liking to take walks by himself? Watching birds, he says.”
    “I think he’s lucky to be happy in his own company.” Aunt Jess was withering. “Most boys and men I know don’t go watching birds. They’re birds themselves—blackbirds. They have to flock with other blackbirds. They can’t stand being alone. Now, women are different. They have their housework. They get used to being alone. If something happens to their husbands, they can fall back on themselves and have something to occupy them. But boys have no housework.They have to run out with other boys. Men go to work with other men. When they come home at night, they have their wives for company. If something happens to her or if they retire, they’re lost. They don’t know what to do with themselves. They’ve never learned to go it alone.”
    Yes, John Donner thought, in the end every man and woman has to go it alone.
    “But there must have been something,” he insisted. “Something when he was young. A disappointment perhaps that left a scar. Or something he passionately wanted and never got.”
    Aunt Jess groaned again, not so deeply and dreadfully as before, but enough to carry her disgust.
    “Every boy that ever lived has disappointments. Johnny less than most. He has as good a mother and father as there are in Unionville. He’s the first boy in town to get a bicycle of his own. His father went to Philadelphia to buy it wholesale.”
    John Donner didn’t hear her. Something in his own words remained in his mind. Could