It commanded a gorgeous view of the town, especially on a clear night like this one. John wondered briefly just how it could be so clear when the humidity was so high. Elise joined him in front of the car and they stood there for a moment, arms around each other’s waists, looking at the hills, which rolled gently off in the direction of Augusta, losing themselves in the shadows of evening.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured.

‘And listen,’ he said.

There was a marshy area of reeds and high grass fifty yards or so behind the barn, and in it a chorus of frogs sang and thumped and snapped the elastics God had for some reason stretched in their throats.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘the frogs are all present and accounted for, anyway.’

‘No toads, though.’ He looked up at the clear sky, in which Venus had now opened her coldly burning eye. ‘There they are, Elise! Up there! Clouds of toads!’

She giggled.

‘ “Tonight in the small town of Willow,” ‘ he intoned, ‘ “a cold front of toads met a warm front of newts, and the result was…“ ‘. She elbowed him. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in.’ They went in. And did not pass Go. And did not collect two hundred dollars.

They went directly to bed.

Elise was startled out of a satisfying drowse an hour or so later by a thump on the roof. She got up on her elbows. ‘What was that, Johnny?’

‘Huzz,’ John said, and turned over on his side.

Toads, she thought, and giggled… but it was a nervous giggle. She got up and went to the window, and before she looked for anything, which might have fallen on the ground, she found herself looking up at the sky.

It was still cloudless, and now shot with a trillion spangled stars. She looked at them, for a moment hypnotized by their simple silent beauty.

Thud.

She jerked back from the window and looked up at the ceiling. Whatever it was, it had hit the roof just overhead.