know...." Ebenezer answered something, but his
responses were so often guttural and indistinguishable that his will to
reply was regarded as nominal, anyway. He also knew that now, just
before him, Buff Miles was proceeding with the snowplow, cutting a firm,
white way, smooth and sparkling for soft treading, momentarily bordered
by a feathery flux, that tumbled and heaped and then lay quiet in a
glitter of crystals. But his thought went on without these things and
without his will.

Bruce's baby! It would be a Rule, too.... the third generation, the
third generation. And accustomed as he was to relate every experience to
himself, measure it, value it by its own value to him, the effect of his
reflection was at first single: The third generation of Rules. _Was he
as old as that?_

It seemed only yesterday that Bruce had been a boy, in a blue necktie to
match his eyes, and shoes which for some reason he always put on wrong,
so that the buttons were on the inside. Bruce's baby. Good heavens! It
had been a shock when Bruce graduated from the high school, a shock when
he had married, but his baby ... it was incredible that he himself
should be so old as that.

... This meant, then, that if Malcolm had lived, Malcolm might have had
a child now....

Ebenezer had not meant to think that. It was as if the Thought came and
spoke to him. He never allowed himself to think of that other life of
his, when his wife, Letty, and his son Malcolm had been living. Nobody
in Old Trail Town ever heard him speak of them or had ever been answered
when Ebenezer had been spoken to concerning them. A high white shaft in
the cemetery marked the two graves. All about them doors had been
closed. But with the thought of this third generation, the doors all
opened. He looked along ways that he had forgotten.

As he went he was unconscious, as he was always unconscious, of the
little street. He saw the market square, not as the heart of the town,
but as a place for buying and selling, and the little shops were to him
not ways of providing the town with life, but ways of providing their
keepers with a livelihood. Beyond these was a familiar setting, arranged
that day with white background and heaped roofs and laden boughs, the
houses standing side by side, like human beings. There they were, like
the chorus to the thing he was thinking about. They were all thinking
about it, too. Every one of them knew what he knew. Yet he never saw the
bond, but