When Ruth McBain becomes a widow in her mid-forties, she decides to make a

drastic change in her life. Her twenty-five year marriage to Tom McBain, a

prominent lawyer in Avalon, Maryland, a small town on the Eastern Shore of

Chesapeake Bay, had eased their empty-nest syndrome when their son and daughter

left for college and later for marriages in distant states. While Tom was alive,

Ruth's world had orbited smoothly in familiar paths. His sudden death from a

heart attack leaves a vacuum which friends and customary activities fail to fill.

She brushes aside well-meaning friends' advice to sell the house which she and

Tom ha spent their entire married life, a home which stands a half-mile down a

quiet country road with only one house next door to keep it company. She

dismisses suggestions that she move into one of the new suburbs which are

popping up like rabbit warrens on land once sacred to soybeans and corn. Ruth

McBain is conventional person with conventional views. Houses, like friendships,

must pass the test of time to be accepted.

Ruth's unconventional decision to become a foster mother to a little girl about

whom she knew nothing other than that the child had been in and out of several

foster homes during the six years she had lived, disturbs her friends, who remind

her of the problems and perils that even two-parent families find difficult to

handle in the "anything goes" decade of the 1990's. She sooths her friends

apprehensions by assuring them that Miss Winters, the social worker assigned to

Lark's case, will instantly be on call if needed. She rarely is.

None of the dire predictions made by Ruth's friends materialize. The lies LArk

tells are small and promptly admitted; her tendency to pocket a bit of loose

change lessens. Lark was not a thief in the harsh sense of the word. She was an

indiscriminate little rat pack, a female Artful Dodger who immediately pled

guilty to petty thefts and cheerfully returned the purloined articles without

apology, denial, or excuses. The child was not into grand larceny; she pilfered

articles which Ruth would gladly have given her had she asked for them;

inexpensive clip-on earrings which Ruth hadn't worn since he got her ears pierced

in honor of the diamond earrings Tom had given her on their tenth anniversary. A

fake garnet bracelet with a broken clasp; an amber candy dish; last summer's

sequinned sunglasses, and every once in a while an all-out emptying of the small

change kept in a small piggy bank on the shelf above the sink. At first it had

been hard for Ruth to keep Miss Winter's advice and "stay cool" when Lark helped

herself to the small change in the piggy bank, but as the weeks passed, Ruth

slowly adjusted to Miss Winter's explanation that to Lark, coins were just

trinkets on par with earrings and sunglasses, and always returned in full to the

piggy bank.

The only problem which Ruth finds hard to accept is the child's determination to

keep Ruth at arm's length; she resists Ruth's attempts to hug her, moves aside if

Ruth reaches out for her. Ruth tells herself that if Lark was consistent in her

withdrawal from everyone, her reaction could be a holdover from something which

happened in the child's troubled past. But the withdrawal of physical and

emotional contact is not consistent; it does not extend to Mary Burdock, th woman

who lives in the only other house on the lane.

In Ruth's opinion, Mark Burdock is pleasant enough, but definitely not a

spell-binder. A woman who is a bit too plump, a bit too average, a bit too

reserved to merit the attention, let alone the adoration, of an unusual child

like Lark. It just didn't make...