"I ... I wish you would let me kiss you like you said that night."
"Why not?" said Maxine. She turned up her face for the first kiss Peter had given a girl in his life.
To Peter the world was non-existent for that moment. Maxine broke away to keep the cocoa from boiling over.
Afterwards she turned out the lights and they sat on the sofa looking out into the starlight. They could see across the creek and across mysterious miles of frozen brown marshland beyond the town to where lights twinkled in distant farmhouses. She put his hand down the neck of her dress and he was surprised and almost frightened by the soft delicacy of her breasts.
"Well," said Maxine from the depths of her pillows. "Are you just going to sit there all night?"
She put her arms around him and kissed him again and again. She drew him down toward her and he found himself strangely wishing to be free.
"No, no, Maxine," he said humbly. "I couldn't. Why, Maxine, you're just an angel to me. I never even thought of you like that."
3
Throughout the rest of her days Temperance Crandall measured time as before or after 1913. Often in later Novembers when the leaves hurried across her lawn and the hickory nuts tumbled down from the shagbark hickory she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
It was of little interest to her that Mrs. Sean McGinty died of cancer of the uterus after bearing thirteen children in eighteen years, or that Father O'Malley in laying her away spoke of her as an outstanding example of motherhood. She scarcely bothered to learn the details of the scandalous conduct of the Reverend Charles MacArthur of the Congregational church who had been caught in a compromising situation with his soprano soloist, thus confirming the worst suspicions of the Methodists. And although Gerty MacDougal, 18, entered the bonds of holy matrimony with Cornelius Vandenheim, 82, just in time to inherit a Civil War pension for life, Temperance all but forgot to pass on the information to Sister Dickenson.