``The blueberry pie is good, Scotty. I recommend it.'' He looked at his son, his face worried. Scotty murmured, ``No, thanks,'' so softly his father had to bend his gaunt height across the table and turn a round brown ear to him. Scotty regarded the ear and the grizzled hair around it with a moment of interest. He said more loudly, ``I'm full, old Pop.'' He had eaten almost nothing on the crested, three sectioned plate and had drunk about half the milk in its paper container.

``He's all right, Craig,'' Rachel said. ``I can fix him something later in the afternoon when we get home.''

Since his seizure, Scotty had had little appetite; yet his changed appearance, surprisingly, was one of plumpness. His face was fuller; his lips and the usually sharp lines of his jaw had become swollen looking. He breathed now with his mouth open, showing a whitely curving section of lower teeth; he kept his eyes, with their puffed blurred lids, always lowered, though not, apparently, focusing. Even his neck seemed thicker and therefore shorter. His hands, which had been as quick as a pair of fluttering birds, were now neither active nor really relaxed. They lay on his lap, palms up, stiffly motionless, the tapered fingers a little thick at the joints. Altogether he had, since the seizure, the appearance of a boy who overindulged in food and took no exercise. He looked lazy, spoiled, a little querulous.