but she made a last effort and said: "I like your coming in like this. My best sleep is over by midnight—just catnaps after that. Night's very long. I want you, every time you've been at the church, to come for a chat afterward. Does me good. Come right in—I'll be awake." And as she said the word "awake" she fell asleep.
And so these strange night meetings began. Night after night, week after week, Finch crept out of the house, had his hours of happiness, of faunlike freedom, and crept in again. He never failed to go to her room, and always she was awake, waiting for him. Her eyes, under their rust-red brows, fixed on him eagerly, as he glided in and drew the door to behind him. He looked forward to the meetings as much as she. Bizarre assignations they were, between the centenarian and a boy of nineteen. Like secret lovers, they avoided each other in the presence of the family, fearing that some intimate look, some secret smile, might betray their intimacy. Finch came to know her, to understand the depths of her, sometimes mordant, sometimes touchingly tender, as he was sure no other member of the household understood her. She no longer seemed old to him, but ageless, like the Chinese porcelain goddess she had given him. Sometimes, in the beam of the night-light, propped in her richly painted bed, she looked beautiful to him, a rugged reclining statue carved by some sculptor who expressed in it his dreams of an indomitable soul.
One night in August, she startled him by asking abruptly: "Well, boy, whom shall I leave my money to?"
"Oh, don't ask me that, Gran! That's for you to say."
"I know. But, just supposing you were in my place, whom would you leave it to? Remember, it's going in one lump sum to somebody. I won't have my bit of money cut up like a cake! Right or wrong, my mind's fixed on that. Now then, Finch, who's to get it, eh?"
"I say—I can't possibly"
"Nonsense! Do as I tell you. Name the one you
