Waiting for the azaleas to open

The winter hangs on cold and wet, the May Day picnic is rained out, and the azaleas will not open — and Cal, having made them the signal for his picnic with Abra, refuses to go without them. Adam slowly improves; the numbness leaves his hand and he can read a little more each day. Lee, meanwhile, has gone to San Francisco for medical books and taught himself the pathology of cerebral haemorrhage well enough to impress Dr. Murphy, and keeps Adam calm by betting on their blood pressures. On 28 May 1918 the First Division takes Cantigny in the American army's first real action of the war. At the end of the month the blossoms break, and Cal and Abra walk out of school and drive the Ford to the Alisal. On the stream bank Abra takes his hand and tells him her father is not ill but frightened, having taken money from his company. At three o'clock Lee finds himself listening; the doorbell rings once and does not ring again. At four he walks into the hall with the telegram in his pocket and a glass of bromide.

Cantigny is dropped in as a paragraph of dry communiqué — units, times, congratulations from Clemenceau — between a picnic that will not start and a doorbell, and the reader does the arithmetic unaided. Cal's insistence on waiting for the azaleas is the chapter's clock. Lee argues himself out of protecting Adam from the news and then reaches for the bromide anyway, calling himself a coward while doing the bravest thing available.