“And you’re in love,” said Nancy Jillet, in an awful whisper.

“How did you know?”

The sisters rocked and looked at each other wisely.

“How did you know?” demanded Alice Ferguson.

“And he doesn’t love you,” said Nancy Jillet.

“Oh,” said Alice.

“And you’re unhappy and out walking late tonight,” said the other sister in an old voice.

Alice stood before them, her head sinking, her eyelids flickering.

“Never you mind, child, never you mind,” whispered Nancy Jillet, uncrossing her arms from her amazing breast. “You came to the right place.”

“I didn’t come...”

“Sh, we’ll help you.”

Alice found herself whispering, also, they were a trio of black velvet and white ermine conspirators, half moon, half shadow, there at the center of the night.

“How?” she whispered.

“We’ll give you a love potion.”

“Oh, but...”

“A love potion, child, to take with you.”

“I can’t afford...”

“No money, child.”

“I don’t believe...”

“You will, child, you’ll believe, when it works.”

“I don’t want to...”

“Bother us? No bother. It’s right inside, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I must be going.”

“Stay just a moment.” The sisters had stopped rocking altogether and were putting their hands out, like hypnotists or tight rope walkers, at her.

“It’s late.”

“You want to win him, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All right then. Directions on the bottle. Get it, sister.” And a moment later, in and out of the house like a huge dream, the sister had gone and fetched the green bottle and it rested, glittering, on the porch railing. Alice reached up her hand in the moonlight. “I don’t know.”

“Try it,” whispered Nancy Jillet. “Try it once, is all we ask. It’s the answer to everything when you’re 18. Go on.”

“But, what’s in it...”

“Nothing, nothing at all. We’ll show you.” And from herself, as if she were bringing forth part of her bosom, Nancy Jillet drew forth a wrapped kerchief. Opening this she spread it on the rail in the moonlight, where a smell of fields and meadows arose instantly from the herbs contained therein.

“White flowers for the moon, summer-myrtle for the stars, lilacs for the rain, a red rose for the heart, a walnut for the mind, for a walnut is cased in itself like a brain, isn’t it, do you see? Some clear water from the spring well to make all run well, and a sprig of pepper-leaf to warm his blood. Alum to make his fear grow small. And a drop of white cream so that he sees your skin like a moonstone. Here they all are, in this kerchief, and here is the potion in the bottle.”

“Will it work?”

“Will it work!” cried Nancy Jillet. “What else could it do but make him follow you like a puppy all the years of your life? Who else would know better how to make a love potion than us? We’ve had since 1910, Alice Ferguson, to think back and mull over and figure out why we were never courted and never married. And it all boils down to this here, in this kerchief, a few bits and pieces, and if it’s too late for us to help ourselves, why then we’ll help you. There you are, take it.”

“Has anyone ever tried it before?”

“Oh, no child. It’s not just something you give to everyone or make and bottle all the time. We’ve done a lot of things in our life, the house is full of antimacassars we’ve knitted, framed mottos, bedspreads, stamp collections, coins, we’ve done everything, we’ve painted and sculpted and gardened by night so no one would bother us. You’ve seen our garden?”

“Yes, it’s lovely.”

“But it was only last week, one night, on my seventieth birthday, I was in the garden with Julia, and we saw you go by late, looking sad. And I turned to Julia and said, because of a man. And Julia said, if only we could help her in her love. And I was fingering a rose bush at the time and I picked a rose and said, Let’s try. So we went all around the garden picking the freshest flowers and feeling young and happy again. So there it is, Alice, rose-water to whirl his senses and mint-leaves to freshen his interest and rain-water to soften his tongue and a dash of tarragon to melt his heart. One, two, three drops and he’s yours, in soda pop, lemonade or iced-tea.”

“I DO LOVE you,” he said.

“Now I won’t need this,” she said, taking out the bottle.

“Pour a little out,” he said, “before you take it back, so it won’t hurt their feelings.”

She poured a little out.

She returned the bottle.

“DID YOU give him some?”

“Yes.”

“Good, good, just wait and see.”

“And now we’ll take some.”

“Will you? I thought it was only for men?”

“It is, dear. But just this once, tonight, we’ll take some, too. And we’ll have beautiful dreams and dream we’re young again.”

They drank from it.

In the very early morning, she awakened to the sound of a siren in the streets of the green town. Running to the window, she looked out and saw what everyone had seen a few minutes before and would remember for years afterward. Miss Nancy and Miss Julia Jillet sitting on their front porch, not moving, in the broad daylight, a thing they had never done before, their eyes closed, their hands dangling at their sides, their mouths agape strangely.

There was something about them, something that suggested sheaths from which the iron blade is gone. This, Alice Ferguson saw, and the crowd moving in, and the police, and the coroner, putting his hand up for the green bottle that glittered brightly in the sunlight, sitting on the rail.

NIGHT MEETING

IT WAS AN evening unlike any he could remember in all of his life. Very early, after the sun went down, and the air was incredibly fresh, he began to tremble, an inner, hidden trembling, of excitement, almost of waiting. He arrived at the depot amid the dispersal of buses, the routine, the pattern, the gas, acceleration, the brakes, and then he was out, in his own bus, the tremor still in him. There were no accidents, it was a clear night, little traffic, few passengers. He drove through the ocean-quiet streets, smelling the salt air and feeling that certain thing in the wind that spelled spring no matter where you were, no matter what you were doing.

He was thirty-eight or thirty-nine, the first faint recession of hair beginning on his brow, the first quilled pricklings of silver touching his temples, the first criss-crossed leather creases starting to fold the back of his neck. He rotated the driver’s wheel now this way, now that, automatically, and it was eleven at night, a sultry hour, warm, a spring night, and the trembling all through his body. He found himself looking and searching everything with his eyes, taking a special pleasure in the lemon ice neon signs and the green mint neon signs, glad to be out of his small apartment, glad of this night routine.

At the end of his first run he walked down to the edge of the sea for a cigarette and a nervous moment of looking at the phosphorescence in the water.

Looking at the ocean, he remembered a night long ago when someone explained the phosphorescence to him; millions upon billions of tiny animal lives were boiling there, seething, reproducing, bringing others like themselves into myriad life, and dying. And the glow of this love in spring caused the shoreline to burn green, and in places like red coals, along the beach as far north as San Francisco, they said, as far south as Acapulco, or Peru, who could say, who could tell?

With his cigarette finished he stood a moment more by the sea wall feeling the wind blow the smell of the old apartment house off his clothes. His hands, though he had washed them, still felt greasy from the deck of solitaire cards he had used most of the afternoon in his room.

He went back to his bus, started the motor and let it idle, humming to himself. The bus was empty, this run was an empty run through sleeping avenues. He talked and sang to himself, to spin out the hours, alone, passing through shadowed moon streets toward the hour when he could go home, fall into a lonely bed, sleep late, and start all over again tomorrow afternoon at four.