It was not as though she noted clearly that her nephews had not been to see her for ten years, not since their last journey eastward to witness their Uncle Izaak being lowered into the rocky soil; that aside from due notification of certain major events in their lives (two marriages, two births, one divorce), Christmas and Easter cards of the traditional sort had been the only thin link she had with them through the widowed years. Her thoughts were not discrete. But there was a look about her mouth as though she were tasting lemons.

She grasped the chair arms and brought her thin body upright, like a bird alert for flight. She turned and walked stiffly into the parlor to the dainty legged escritoire, warped and cracked now from fifty years in an atmosphere of sea spray. There she extracted two limp vellum sheets and wrote off the letters, one to Abel, one to Mark.

Once her trembling hand, with the pen grasped tight in it, was pressed against the paper the words came sharply, smoothly, as authoritatively as they would dropping from her own lips. And the stiffly regal look of them, she saw grimly, lacked the quaver of age which, thwarting the efforts of her amazing will, ran through her spoken words like a thin ragged string. ``Please come down as soon as you conveniently can,'' the upright letters stalked from the broad nibbed pen, ``I have an important matter to discuss with you.'' To Abel: ``I am afraid there is not much to amuse small children here. I should be obliged if you could make other arrangements for your daughters. You may stay as long as you wish, of course, but if arranging for the care of the girls must take time into account, I think a day or two should be enough to finish our business in.'' To Mark: ``Please give my regards to Myra.''