When she asks for a ride, he pretends he is too busy to take her back to her house and drives past her. She reaches the area that she and her friends had always used for skating. However, the river has changed its course since she last skated there and the shallow part that froze solid is no longer there. Lucy is so angry at Harry for driving past her that she does not notice any change in the river. When she skates toward the center, the ice cracks and she falls through. One of her skates catches on a submerged branch of a tree that had fallen in during the spring flood last year. Her body is found by her father and other locals. Book III This book is written from Harry Gordon's point of view and includes his reflections. Twenty-five years later, in 1927, Mr. Gayheart is brought back from Chicago, where he died in a hospital. Pauline had died five years earlier, so he was the sole remaining member of the family. Many people turn up at the funeral. Harry had become chummy with Mr Gayheart after Pauline's death and they would often play chess together. It is revealed in Harry's thoughts that he had regretted his hasty marriage and that it had been in retaliation for Lucy's rejection. When she returned to Haverford, he realized that he still loved her, but still wanted to punish her for rejecting him so he avoided her and tried to distance himself from her, even though he knew she wanted contact. "He knew that if he were alone with her for a moment and she held out her hands to him with that look [of pleading], he couldn't punish her any more -- and she deserved to be punished." He blamed himself for her death. Harry had given Mr. Gayheart a mortgage with the Gayheart farm as surety in the last years of Mr. Gayheart's life. Mr. Gayheart had been unable to repay the mortgage, so Harry now owned the farm. He ponders on the footprints made by Lucy at 13 in a concrete sidewalk when it was newly laid. He tells his bank assistant Milton Chase that he can have the farmhouse to live in, provided that Chase makes sure that nothing happens to the footprints. He says that Chase will inherit the farm when he dies. References External