She made herself some tea and sandwiches and carried them in a basket to a 
meadow, where she liked to sit among the wildflowers and read. Constable 
Moore's house was a melancholy place without the Constable in it, and it had 
been several weeks since she had seen him. During the last two years he had 
been called away on business with increasing frequency, vanishing (as she 
supposed) into the interior of China for days, then weeks at a time, coming 
back depressed
and exhausted to find solace in whiskey, which he consumed in surprisingly 
moderate quantities but with fierce concentration, and in midnight bagpipe 
recitals that woke up everyone in Dovetail and a few sensitive sleepers in the 
New Atlantis Clave.