He could tell they were approaching the sea. The air took on a special strength now that they'd left the fecund warmth of the farmland behind. There was the smell of the coast, like a primeval memory, composed of equal parts salt water, clams, seaweed and northern air. He turned from the flying trees to look ahead and saw with an inward boy's eye again the great fieldstone house which, built on one of the many acres of ancestral land bordering the west harbor, had been Izaak's bride-gift to his cousin wife as the last century ended.

Mark's thoughts must have been keeping silent pace beside his own, climbing the same crags in dirty white sneakers, clambering out on top of the headland and coming upon the sudden glinting water at the same instant. ``Remember the Starbird?'' Mark asked, and Abel lifted his eyes from the double lines in the middle of the road, the twin white ribbons which the car swallowed rapidly as it ascended the crest of the hill and came down.

``The Starbird,'' Abel said. There was the day Uncle Izaak had, in an unexpected grandiose gesture, handed over the pretty sloop to Abel for keeps, on condition that he never fail to let his brother accompany him whenever the younger boy wished. The two of them had developed into a remarkable sailing team. All of this happening in a time of their lives when their youth and their brotherhood knitted them together as no other time or circumstance could. They seemed then to have had a single mind and body, a mutuality which had been accepted with the fact of their youth, casually. He saw the Starbird as she lay, her slender mast up and gently turning, its point describing constant languid circles against a cumulus sky. Both of them had known the feeling of the small life in her waiting, ready, for the two of them to run up her sails. The Starbird had been long at the bottom of the bay.