The forsythia shook, not with the wind, and out came a stooped brown figure. It was Mrs. Willens in her old gardening clothes, a lumpy little woman in baggy slacks and a ripped jacket and a peaked cap that might have been her husband’s-it slipped down too low and almost hid her eyes. She was carrying a pair of shears.

They slowed right down-it was either that or run. Maybe they thought that she wouldn’t notice them, that they could turn themselves into posts. But she had seen them already; that was why she came hastening through.

“I see you’re gawking at my forsythia,” said Mrs. Willens. “Would you like some to take home?”

What they had been gawking at was not the forsythia but the whole scene-the house looking just as usual, the sign by the office door, the curtains letting light in. Nothing hollow or ominous, nothing that said that Mr. Willens was not inside and that his car was not in the garage behind his office but in Jutland Pond. And Mrs. Willens out working in her yard, where anybody would expect her to be-everybody in town said so-the minute the snow was melted. And calling out in her familiar tobacco-roughened voice, abrupt and challenging but not unfriendly-a voice identifiable half a block away or coming from the back of any store.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait, now, I’ll get you some.”

She began smartly, selectively snapping off the bright-yellow branches, and when she had all she wanted she came towards them behind a screen of flowers.

“Here you are,” she said. “Take these home to your mothers. It’s always good to see the forsythia, it’s the very first thing in the spring.” She was dividing the branches among them. “Like all Gaul,” she said. “All Gaul is divided into three parts. You must know about that if you take Latin.”

“We aren’t in high school yet,” said Jimmy, whose life at home had readied him, better than the others, for talking to ladies.