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Show 78 I'll see if she's gone down to the ocean." The two men scramble into their coats, clatter out across the gravel in the driveway. But just then they see her coming, an old woman, shrouded in an old dark cloak, moving slowly up the path from the beach. "Where have you been!" the two men scold, though it is perfectly apparent. "You are not to leave the house alone. And not after dark. And not to go near the ocean." Rod is puffed, agitated, red in the face. Annis looks at them with genuine surprise. "I didn't mean to worry you," she says, "though it is getting dark. I just wanted a walk. A good walk, by mayself." She removes the cloak, spreads it out on the steps of the porch. "Let me tell you what I saw." She is so calm, so mysterious, so enveloping, that as she slowly seats herself on the cloak-covered steps, the two men begin to lose their anger, and slowly sit beside her too. Their sister's child hunches on the step below, at her grandmother's feet. "Dear children," she begins, and she tells them about the broken eucalyptus, the anenomes, the rhythm of the waves on the beach. Rod is still a little angry, still puffed, but he allows himself to settle on the steps, almost at his mother's knee. She strokes the head of Luel's child between her hands. "The older you grow, the more important solitude becomes, and the harder it is to find it. It is hard to find a way to be alone, but that is the most important thing there is." She sits forward on the steps, and her tone alters from that dreamlike, distant quality it sometimes has, to the straight sharp matter-of-fact way she often speaks. "I know it's hard for you to understand why I don't want to move to that |