Eyes shifting warily from side to side, he crossed the street, and
proceeded home. He no longer thought of death, except to fear it. As
soon as he was inside, he poured himself a more than generous drink. Oddly, Tansy had set out soda and ice. He mixed the highball and gulped
it down. So he had been given two weeks? Two weeks in which to pick his life
slowly apart, savor each stage of doom, before he should walk again the
narrow corridor at the end of which a truck was always rumbling by. Anger surged in him at the idea. But perhaps that was what he was supposed to do--get angry. He mixed himself another drink, took a gulp, then looked at it
doubtfully. Perhaps that was part of the plan, too. *       *       *       *       *

Tansy came in, carrying a bundle. Her face was smiling and a little
flushed. With a sigh of relief she set down the bundle and pushed aside
the dark bangs from her forehead. "_Whew_, what a sweltering day. I thought you'd be wanting a
drink. Here, let me finish that one for you." When she put down the glass there was only ice in it. "There, now we're
blood brothers or something. Mix yourself another." "That was my second," he told her. "Oh, heck, I thought I was cheating you." She sat on the edge of the
table and wagged a finger in his face. "Look, mister, you need a rest. Or some excitement. I'm not sure which. Maybe both. Now here's my
plan. I make us a cold supper--sandwiches. Then, when it's dark and
nobody can see us, we get Oscar out of the garage, and sinfully waste a
half gram of rubber off his tires in driving to the Top of the Hill. We
haven't done that for years. How about it, mister?" He hesitated. Helped by the drink, his thoughts were veering. This was
a crazy situation. Half his mind was still gripped by a sickening,
panicky apprehension for his immediate personal future. The other half
was coming under the spell of Tansy's gaiety. She reached out and pinched his nose. "How about it?" "All right," he said. "Hey, you're supposed to act interested!" She slid off the table,
started for the kitchen, then added darkly over her shoulder, "But that
will come later." She looked provocatively pretty, in her mock anger. He couldn't see any
difference between now and fifteen years ago. He felt he was seeing her
for the hundredth first time. When the sandwiches came, he was reading the evening paper. The
disquieting half-and-half mood persisted. He had found a local-interest
item at the bottom of the fifth page. STUDENT PRANKSTERS AT WORK AGAIN

    A practical joke is worth any amount of trouble and physical
    exertion. At least, that is the sentiment of a group of Hempnell
    College students, as yet unidentified. But we are wondering about
    the sentiments of Professor Norman Saylor, when he looked out the
    window this morning and saw a stone gargoyle weighing a good three
    hundred pounds sitting in the middle of his lawn. It had been
    removed from the roof of one of the college buildings. How the
    students managed to detach it, lower it from the roof, and
    transport it to Professor Saylor's residence, is still a mystery. Said Professor Saylor, "Thanks for the lawn ornament, boys, but I
    really don't want it." When President Randolph Pollard was asked if the pranksters had
    been identified, he laughingly replied. "I guess our War Program of
    physical education for men must be providing them with reserves of
    excess strength and energy." When we spoke to President Pollard he was leaving to address the
    Lions' Club on "The College in War-time." (For details of his
    address, see page 1.) Just what you might expect. The usual repertorial inaccuracies. It
wasn't a gargoyle; gargoyles are ornamental rainspouts. And the
reporter had not used the lightning angle in his story. Probably
thought it would sound too fishy. Finally, the familiar touch of turning the item into an advertisement
for the physical-education department. You had to admit that the
Hempnell publicity office had a kind of efficiency. Tansy swept the paper out of his hands. "The world can wait," she said. "Here, have a bite of my sandwich." VIII. It was quite dark when they started for the Hill. He drove carefully,
taking his time at intersections. Tansy's gaiety still did no more than
hold in check the other half of his thoughts. "I might be a witch," she said, "taking you to a hilltop rendezvous. Our own private Sabbat." She was smiling impishly. She had changed to a light white sports
dress. She looked like one of his students. Again he felt the craziness of the situation. The line between
reality and pretense was become harder to distinguish. He must keep
carefully in mind that when she said things like that, she was making a
courageous mockery of her previous behavior. He must on no account let
her see the other half of his thoughts. Or was that what she wanted? The lights of the town dropped behind. Half a mile out, he turned off
sharply onto the road that wound up the hill. It was bumpier than he
remembered from the last time--was it as much as ten years ago? And the
trees were thicker, brushing the windshield. When they emerged into the half acre of clearing on the top, the moon,
two days after full, was rising redly. Tansy pointed to it and said, "Check! I timed it perfectly. But where
are the others? There always used to be two or three cars up here. And
on a night like this!" He stopped the car close to the edge. "Fashions in lovers' lanes change
like anything else," he told her. "We're traveling a disused folkway." "Always the sociologist!" "I guess so. Maybe Mrs. Carr found out about this place. And I suppose
the students range farther afield nowadays, or did until this year." She rested her head on his shoulder. He switched off the headlights,
and the moon cast soft shadows. "We used to do this at Gorham," she murmured. "When I was taking your
classes, and you were the serious young instructor. Until I found out
you weren't any different from the college boys--only better. Remember?" He nodded and took her hand. He looked down at the town, made out the
campus, with its prominent floodlights designed to chase couples out
of dark corners. Those garishly floodlighted Gothic buildings seemed
for the moment to symbolize a whole world of barren intellectual
competition and jealous traditionalism, a world toward which at the
moment he felt as alien as if he were still twenty-six instead of
forty-one and Tansy twenty-one instead of thirty-six. "I wonder if that's why they hate us so?" he said, almost without
thinking. "Whatever are you talking about?" But the question sounded lazy. "I mean the rest of the faculty, or most of them. Is it because we can
do things like this?" She laughed. "So you're actually coming alive. We don't do things like
this so very often, you know." He kept on with his idea. "It's a devilishly competitive and jealous
life. The war, doing away with some of it, makes you more conscious of
the rest.