Runaway

be fierce when she’s a watchdog, but not when she’s walking.”
    Robin hardly knew one breed of dog from another. Because of Joanne’s asthma, they never had dogs or cats around the house.
    “It’s all right,” she said.
    Instead of going ahead to where the dog Juno was waiting, her owner called her back. He fixed the leash he was carrying onto her collar.
    “I let her loose down on the grass. Down below the theater. She likes that. But she ought to be on the leash up here. I was lazy. Are you ill?”
    Robin did not even feel surprised at this change in the conversation’s direction. She said, “I lost my purse. It was my own fault. I left it by the washbasin in the Ladies Room at the theater and I went back to look but it was gone. I just walked away and left it there after the play.”
    “What play was it today?”
    “Antony and Cleopatra,”
she said. “My money was in it and my train ticket home.”
    “You came on the train? To see
Antony and Cleopatra
?”
    “Yes.”
    She remembered the advice their mother had given to her and to Joanne about travelling on the train, or travelling anywhere. Always have a couple of bills folded and pinned to your underwear. Also, don’t get into a conversation with a strange man.
    “What are you smiling at?” he said.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, you can go on smiling,” he said, “because I will be happy to lend you some money for the train. What time does it go?”
    She told him, and he said, “All right. But before that you should have some food. Or you will be hungry and not enjoy the train ride. I haven’t anything with me, because when I go to take Juno on her walk I do not bring any money. But it isn’t far to my shop. Come with me and I’ll get it out of the till.”
    She had been too preoccupied, until now, to notice that he spoke with an accent. What was it? It was not French or Dutch—the two accents that she thought she could recognize, French from school and Dutch from the immigrants who were sometimes patients in the hospital. And the other thing she took note of was that he spoke of her enjoying the train ride. Nobody she knew would speak of a grown person doing that. But he spoke of it as being quite natural and necessary.
    At the corner of Downie Street, he said, “We turn this way. My house is just along here.”
    He said
house,
when he had said
shop
before. But it could be that his shop was in his house.
    She was not worried. Afterwards she wondered about that. Without a moment’s hesitation she had accepted his offer of help, allowed him to rescue her, found it entirely natural that he should not carry money with him on his walks but could get it from the till in his shop.
    A reason for this might have been his accent. Some of the nurses mocked the accents of the Dutch farmers and their wives—behind their backs, of course. So Robin had got into the habit of treating such people with special consideration, as if they had speech impediments, or even some mental slowness, though she knew that this was nonsense. An accent, therefore, roused in her a certain benevolence and politeness.
    And she had not looked at him at all closely. At first she was too upset, and then it was not easy, because they were walking side by side. He was tall, long-legged, and walked quickly. One thing she had noticed was the sunlight glinting on his hair, which was cut short as stubble, and it seemed to her that it was bright silver. That is, gray. His forehead, being broad and high, also shone in the sun, and she had somehow got the impression that he was a generation beyond her—a courteous, yet slightly impatient, schoolteacherly, high-handed sort of person, who demanded respect, never intimacy. Later, indoors, she was able to see that the gray hair was mixed with a rusty red—though his skin had an olive tint unusual for a redhead—and that his indoor movements were sometimes awkward, as if he wasn’t used to having company in his living space. He was probably not more than ten years older than she was.
    She had trusted him for faulty reasons. But she had not been mistaken to do so.
    The shop really was in a house. A narrow brick house left over from earlier days, on a street otherwise lined with buildings built to be shops. There was the sort of front door and step and window that a regular house would have, and in the window was an elaborate clock. He unlocked the door, but did not turn around the sign that said
Closed.
Juno crowded in ahead of