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Show 414 in the study yesterday, and not just talking but evidently listening too, because there were pauses in her monologue and then she would say something in the tone she used when she was contradicting you. He had been on the point of turning and quietly leaving, but she had looked up. "Just seeing how you were," he said. "I'm talking to your father's picture," she said, irritated. "I'll come hack later," he said. At least she had been aware she was behaving abnormally. He ventured a glance at her now, while Thornbury was telling the story about how Charles took a wrong turnoff on a dirt road once while driving back from an oil field in Nevada years ago and had found himself at three in the morning hopelessly lost, with two smashed headlights, somewhere deep in the Wah Wah Mountains. Lorin knew she had heard that story a hundred times, and he noticed she was smiling as she listened to Bill tell it again. The point of the story was the spiritual experience his father had had when he had entered the mouth of an old mine drift to pray, and since that part always made Lorin uncomfortable--!' n fact it gave him the creeps-he tuned out and decided to try one more time. Resuming was difficult. Vapors flitted back and forth behind a grainy transparency and gradually hardened into the old couple moving around the room tidying up. His father still lay on the floor, his nose flattened sideways and his arms flung out. The old man gripped him under the arms and hefted him to his knees and then his feet, where he stood tottering. The old woman fitted his glasses back onto his face and straightened his collar. Get him looking nice, she said. That's what we'll do. The gist of the story was that Lorin's father, in the mine drift, had felt a strong presence of something that loved him, and he had gotten up from his knees and strode out of the cavity in the hillside with a |