Suddenly Sandra stopped very still as if she had heard something and then she sat watching the window where I had just seen him, and even the children playing near would not distract her.

Finally the old couple went off to the sandbox to watch the children, and, as if he had been waiting there for them to leave, the boy came out of the doorway of the boarding house and walked up to us.

"Does your cat really smile?" he asked.

"Sure," I said. "Go ahead and ask her."

He called her name and asked her to smile and I knew he had been listening to us. Sandra not only smiled but walked around him purring.

I said, "Sandra, stop that. You shouldn't annoy him."

What a bold thing she was getting to be!

He seemed only a little embarrassed and I was immensely encouraged. "Nice day," I said. "Isn't it?"

He suddenly seemed to be in another place. Perhaps I had frightened him away again. Sandra made one small sound and he had already gone. "Goodnight," I said.

But we saw him again the next evening and Sandra washed and smiled and purred and he petted her and occasionally nodded to me. Then, after a sufficient time to get acquainted-perhaps I missed something-as if at a signal, he began to talk. Had I given some signal without knowing it?

He was on television, he said, on a muscle-building show as an example of the AFTER, and he laughed and Sandra smiled, and I smiled at him. But he felt like a prostitute being on television as there were better things for a trained person to do and it was, he admitted, pretty bad on the nerves. Sometimes he could hardly breathe.

He said he wanted Sandra to be on his television show and could work her in fine as a loveable gimmick with perhaps another sponsor. But I could not imagine Sandra with him on a muscle-building show.

"But," I said, "Sandra is a very modest girl and might be frightened." "Modest?" he said, looking at her.

Sandra was washing herself at his feet as if no one were watching. I told her to stop and asked him if he would walk with us a bit. Perhaps he was only interested in Sandra. Or would he get frightened off again?

He said he didn't mind if he did and laughed, almost too boisterously I thought. But I already felt as if I were caught in a powerful and wonderful magnetic current of delight coming from him, and so I said, "Let's go."

And the ghost of John, who must have been there with us until then, vanished in a vibrant excitement that made me walk faster with the boy and almost see the electricity in the high-tension wires that went down the street, as if I were energized by him with an electrical polarity on his white-shirted shoulders and the worn white back-end of his jeans.

At my door I stopped and he stopped, as if he knew, and he and Sandra were smiling.

"I am going to make some drinks," I said. "Would you like to come up?" I was so frightened; I must have spoken very softly.

"What?" he asked.

"I am going upstairs to mix some drinks," I said. He said, "Oh," rather strangely.

I thought he was refusing me, and I turned quickly away to avoid showing how hurt I was. But he spoke first. With a crooked smile on his face that I saw

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