Rumors of Peace (40 page)

ELLA LEFFLAND
grew up in Martinez, California, and graduated from San Jose State College. She is the author of three highly acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories (including the title story “Last Courtesies,” which shared first prize in the 1977 O. Henry Collection). Her stories have appeared in such periodicals as
Harper's Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker,
and
Cosmopolitan.

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Also by Ella Leffland

Mrs. Munck

Love Out of Season

Last Courtesies and Other Stories

The Knight, Death, and the Devil

Breath and Shadows

Cover design by Adam Johnson

Cover photograph © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos

Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following: Excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from
Collected Poems, 1909-1962
by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Excerpt from “On the Road to Mandalay” by Rudyard Kipling. Reprinted with permission of Macmillan International, Ltd., London and Basingstoke, England, on behalf of The National Trust.

Portions of this work originally appeared in
Harper's Magazine, Redbook,
and
Family Circle.

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

RUMORS OF PEACE
. Copyright © 1979 by Ella Leffland. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

F
IRST
P
ERENNIAL
L
IBRARY EDITION PUBLISHED
1985.

F
IRST
H
ARPER
P
ERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED
2011.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-06-201528-0

EPub Edition August 2016 ISBN 9780062663467

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