"Now just remember, act natural," said the man, for what seemed to the boy to be the hundredth time. "She's not the least bit wise, and if you don't get nervous she won't suspect a thing."

Then the front door of the house flew open and a woman appeared on the steps. She was a short, fat little woman in her sixties, brisk and cheery, wearing a plain white blouse and a brown skirt, her faded hair curling neatly around her plump, beaming face. The boy thought he saw a surprised expression cross her face as she waved, but it went away so quickly that he could not be sure. "Hey son, hi you?" she called down to the older man.

"I'm fine, mother, and you?" he replied.

"Just fine," she shouted back. Then, since neither the man nor the boy made a move to get out of the car, she said, with a forced laugh. "Aren't you coming in?"

"Sure, sure; give us a minute." The man's voice began trembling with illconcealed emotion, and he got out of the car with a self-conscious stiffness. The boy followed him across the short front lawn and watched as he kissed his mother on the cheek. She tried to hug him, but he pulled away. Then he turned to the boy and said:

"Mother, I'd like you to meet Bobby Tucker, a friend of mine from Atlanta." "Hey, Bobby, hi you?" she said, looking down at him from the steps with a bland, impersonal expression in her eyes. "Peter didn't tell me he was bringing anybody home, so you'll have to take pot luck. Son, why didn't you?"

Without waiting for an answer, and without ever ceasing to talk, she put her hand on her son's elbow and guided him into the house. "Y'all come on in," she said. "I know you must be worn out after that long drive. Son, I don't see how you can drive around in the middle of summer with the top down and no hat on. It's a wonder you don't catch sunstroke. Now, when I was a girl. . . ."

The house was cool and old-fashioned, with the still, spotless look of a home without children, and the back sitting room, to which the woman conducted her son and his guest, was crammed with comfortable furniture, family photographs and knickknacks. Outside the windows the small dark leaves of a boxwood hedge pressed so close that they shut out most of the sun, leaving the room in a sort of submarine twilight.

"Y'all sit in here, where it's nice and cool," said the woman. "Or would you rather go out in the boxwood garden? I know you want to show it to your friend, son. I've got some cokes in the icebox; I'll go fix us some.

As she disappeared toward the kitchen, Bobby found himself sitting on the edge of a chair, tense and uncomfortable, feeling that he might at any moment jump up and run away. Peter was pacing about the room, staring at the keepsakes and family photographs which cluttered the table tops as if he wanted to sweep them off onto the floor. His eyes avoided Bobby's, and after a moment he jerked his head toward the boxwood garden outside and said, "Come on, let's go on out. It's no worse there than here." So Bobby followed him through the back hall to the door that opened onto the garden.

During the previous months Bobby had heard a great deal about Peter's boxwood garden-how old it was; how ragged and run down; how, in the almost two hundred years since it had been planted, it had declined from the proud and handsome showpiece of a large plantation to an overgrown jungle in a city back yard; and how it had resisted all of Peter's efforts to restore it. But nothing that he had heard had prepared him for what he now saw. In the gardens that Peter designed in Atlanta the dense and small-leafed boxwood shrubs, seldom more