Arthur was eighty-one years old, a widower, and rich in the particular way that makes the people around a person go quiet when he enters a room.

His own staff lowered their voices near him, not out of warmth but out of a wariness I did not understand at first.

He was not bedridden.

He still dressed each morning and walked the halls and read his papers in a leather chair by a tall window.

But he knew, with the clear unsentimental knowledge of a man who had been told the truth by his physicians, that he was dying.

He had made, I would learn, a kind of peace with the fact of it that most people never manage; what he had not made peace with was the manner of it, the circling children and the poisoned house, the sense of being hurried toward an exit by the very people who should have wanted to keep him.