oseless, like
the unsustained flights of wing-clipped birds. He knew that he was
being followed, and he had a confused sense of something impending,
and yet he was unable or unwilling to face the issue honestly. There
were moments when he glimpsed the truth, but he seemed unmoved by
these truant realizations. Was he too tired to care? He used to
wonder, when he read in the newspapers of some man overtaken by an
overwhelming disgrace, how it was possible to go on living under such
circumstances. Was his indifference of this afternoon the preliminary
move in a long series of heartbreaking compromises and retreats? he
asked himself. But he did not attempt to answer any of these darting
questions. After all, the sun was shining and about him the world
seemed to be swinging on with disarming normality. Upon the trimmed
lawns peacocks strutted and shrieked and from remoter distances the
soft call of the quail echoed caressingly. It was good to be alive,
with one's feet firmly planted on the earth. To be alive and _free_!

He passed the conservatory and the sunken gardens, flamboyant with
purple-and-gold pansies; he dawdled over the aviary and the bear
cages. He even stopped for tea at the Japanese garden, throwing bits
of sweetened rice-flour cakes to the goldfishes in their
chocolate-colored pond near the tea pavilion. He found himself later
skirting Stow Lake, pursued by flocks of ubiquitous coots, bent upon
any stray crumbs flung in their direction. Finally he dipped suddenly
down into the wilder reaches of the Park, taking aimless trails that
wandered off into sandy wastes or fetched up quite suddenly upon the
trimly bordered main driveway. He always had preferred the untamed
stretches that lay beyond Stow Lake. Here, as a young boy, he had
organized scouting parties when it was still a remote, almost an
unforested sand pile. Later, when the trees had conquered its
bleakness, Helen and he had spent many a Saturday afternoon tramping
briskly through the pines to the ocean. How long ago that seemed, and
yet how very near! Not long in point of time, somehow, but long in
point of accessibility. He seemed to be standing, as it were, upon the
threshold of a past that he could glimpse, but not re-enter. Even
Helen seemed remote--a part of the background that had been, instead
of an equal spectator with him in a review of these dead events.

It was nearly five o'clock when he drew near the first wind-stunted
pine trees heraldin