d the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The
man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly,
while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and
then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this
distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously,
for he wished to go on with his thoughts.

"Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere
over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot
afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see
the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All
the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew
without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to
be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some
reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one
with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the
leaf she would say "Yes" at once. But the dragonfly went round and
round: it never settled anywhere--of course not, happily not, or I
shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor and the children--Tell me,
Eleanor. D'you ever think of the past?"

"Why do you ask, Simon?"

"Because I've been thinking of the past. I've been thinking of Lily,
the woman I might have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind
my thinking of the past?"

"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a
garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past,
all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under
the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?"

"For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly--"

"For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels
twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies,
the first red water-lilies I'd ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on
the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I
couldn't paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would
allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only--it was so
precious--the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose,
the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert."

They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and
soon diminished in size among the trees and