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worrying of his own when he didn’t find him in Hanover.
    But on the sunny afternoon the Atropos landed in Portsmouth, John Roger was there to meet the ship. And found out from one of its officers that Samuel T Wolfe was not among the crew and had in fact not reported for duty before the ship left Portsmouth in August. All John Roger could think to say was, “I see.”
    He walked along the waterfront for a time without a coherent thought, then halted and looked about him like a roused sleepwalker. Then made directly for the Yardarm Inn where he and Sammy had quartered the previous summer. The desk man consulted a register and said that a Samuel Wolfe had been living there at the end of August, all right, but had quit the premises in debt of a day’s rent. The date of his arrears coincided with John Roger’s departure for Hanover. If he’d left any possessions they had been sold or discarded.
    John Roger then went to the office of the city graveyard and pored over its registries. Then to the local hospital, where an administrator carefully examined its record of patients. In none of those pages was entered his brother’s name. Over the next weeks he went to every jail and prison fifty miles to the north and south of Portsmouth. In Boston the jail clerk ran his finger down the inmate ledger and stopped at a name and looked at it more closely. “Ah yah,” he said, “Samuel Wolfe, right here he is. And don’t I remember him now?” He peered over the rims of his spectacles at John Roger, whose pulse sped. “But grayhaired he was and black in the teeth with his sixty years and more, so I don’t suppose he was your brother, now was he?” John Roger said, “ Damn it!”—and received a severe look and stern reminder that he was in a Boston municipal office and not in some waterfront public house and such profanity could get him ten days in one of the cells down the hall.
    He was at breakfast in a café when it occurred to him that Samuel Thomas may have contracted amnesia by some means and be wandering about with no inkling of his own identity. Perhaps right there in Boston. For the next three days he scoured the city streets before conceding the impossible odds of finding him by this haphazard means. Then admitted the desperate foolishness of thinking Sammy could be amnestic. Unable to think of what else he might do, he returned to Hanover.
    He lived in a small and Spartan room near the campus, his scholarship not providing for dormitory lodging. He lay awake deep into the nights, his imagination amok and returning again and again to the grim possibility that Samuel Thomas had been killed in some hideous accident or taken fatally ill, his unidentified remains consigned to a pauper’s grave. Or had been murdered while being robbed, or in some street affray, and his body pitched into the river or the sea or the city refuse pit to be burned with the waste. He could conceive of no other explanations for his brother’s disappearance and lack of communication. He spent part of every day staring at their graduation picture.
    The summer was waning into its last weeks when he awoke one morning with the sure conviction that Samuel Thomas was dead, and that he may have been dead since their first night apart. Dead all that time that he had so blithely thought of him as alive. He could hardly draw breath against the crushing sensation of his loss, his overwhelming aloneness. “Oh God, Sammy!” he said. Then wept with such force he ruptured a blood vessel in his throat. Which became infected, then worsened, then prostrated him with a raging fever.
    He had not come out of his room for three days when his landlady, Mrs Burrows, who had doted on him through his freshman year, became concerned. She tapped at his door and asked if all was well. Then knocked louder but still received no reply. And so let herself into the shadowy quarters and discovered him abed and