"And so when you first saw me, you thought--" He began, then stopped
because she was blushing.
"How long have you been getting them?"
"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new
ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast."
"But how does this--person get these boxes to you out here? Does he
give them to your aunts and do they put them there?"
"I'm not sure."
"But how can they get them in winter?"
"I don't know."
"Look here," he said, pouring himself more lemonade, "how long is it
since you've been to the mainland?"
"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle
of the war."
"What war?" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.
"The World War, of course. What's the matter?"
Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind
of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him
had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders,
the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his
nostrils. He could still hear the faint _chop-chop_ of the waves.
And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape
glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to
a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the
newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read: