too bad he was the one who had to die." Anna glared venomously at Roger, and stamped from the kitchen.

In the living room, Roger sank into the nearest chair, bent on recollecting the events leading up to that morning. For weeks, he had known that something was going wrong his mother's quick, suspicious looks at him and Ted when she would find them talking. . . the furious glances at Ted when they would walk into the house together, Ted's arm around his shoulder. For that first time he began to realize how his life had changed in the six months that Ted had lived with them.

A distant cousin, Ted had previously been living with his grandmother in Dunesville, a small fishing town on the Gulf Coast. He had arrived at the inland village of Kent exactly a year from the day when Roger's older brother had died of pneumonia. Anna's husband had deserted the family long ago, when Roger was just reaching his teens and his older brother was about twenty. Thus for many years, Roger had been living in what was, to all intents and purposes, a fatherless home. When Theodore's grandmother had begun writing Anna, asking if Ted might come to live with them, Anna was at first torn between wanting someone to take her first son's place about the house, and her desire to possess Roger as completely as possible.

"Theodore's a good boy, Anna, no matter what you may have heard," the grandmother had written in her first letter. "He's just gotten out of step with things here in Dunesville. It would be good for him to settle in a different town, where people don't hold things against him..."

The other version, Aunt Martha's version, of Ted's life in Dunesville had not reached Kent until a month after Ted had moved in with them, as the climax of a long series of imploring letters to Anna. Looking back, Roger could clearly remember the afternoon when his aunt's letter had arrived.

"Well, a letter from Martha," his mother had remarked in her sharp, mirthless way, as she brought the letter in from the mailbox. "First time I ever did hear from her except at Christmas." Ted's face had darkened as he watched the letter torn from its envelope. "Hmm-m, let's see . . . 'Dear Anna . . . I just now heard about the... new ... addition to your household, and I have been wondering . . . how you could be... could be... so stu..." ... so stu..." Anna's voice sank to a whisper, then stopped as her eye leaped ahead to the ensuing sentences. Roger was watching Ted then, and had been startled by the suddenly downcast glance, knotted eyebrows, and blanched face. There was a strained hush. Then . . . "I ... I can hardly make out the writing," Anna had mumbled, folding the letter and taking it hurriedly upstairs. It was from that moment, Roger recalled, that his mother had changed toward Ted, and finally toward them both. He leaned forward in his chair intently. His mind suddenly clearing, he began to think over the memories of his relationship with Ted.

Although he, Roger, was reaching twenty-one, he had spent all his life the virtual prisoner of his family and of his small community; while Theodore, a tall, spare, prepossessing twenty-five, had spent his early manhood in extensive travels with his family. Ted's lean, chiselled face radiated good-natured charm and quiet self-confidence. He had seemed to want Roger's company from the first, in a manner that was vital . . . intense, and at the same time oddly distant and careful. During the past month or so, Roger had come to feel far closer to him than to his dead brother, and until this morning had often wondered at the curious blend of warmth and reserve that Ted usually displayed toward him.

He rose uneasily from his chair and began to pace the living room. He caught

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