The day Yolande ran away from home, never to return— never to return to Bellefleur Manor—was also the day of Germaine's first birthday. But was there any connection between the two events....?

On that dry, warm, relentlessly sunny August day, when no breeze blew across Lake Noir, or down from the mountains, there was to be a large birthday party in the late afternoon, to which Leah had impulsively invited all the young children in the area and their mothers—all the children from reasonably good families, that is. (And she invited the Renauds, whom she rarely saw now, and the Steadmans and the Burnsides, and even wrote out an invitation to the Fuhrs which, when she reread it, struck her as humiliatingly meek: so she discarded it.) In her enthusiasm over seeking out financial and political support for the family, Leah had quite neglected people close to home; she had not even thought of them for months. Please come to help us celebrate the first birthday of our darling Germaine, she wrote gaily.

At tea-time there would be a huge square chocolate cake with pink frosting and GERMAINE 1 YEAR OLD in creamy vanilla letters and an entire table and a stone bench heaped with presents out back on the terrace; there would be paper hats and noisemakers and surprise treats for the younger children, and champagne for everyone else, and even musical entertainment (Vernon planned to play his flute, while Yolande and Vida danced, costumed in long dresses and veils and feather boas dragged out of one of the trunks in the attic); and Jasper was to lead his young Irish setter through the complicated tricks he had taught the dog over the summer.