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Some mornings I woke even before William did, and I would take my walk because I was so anxious. And I was anxious because of the girls. One day I called Chrissy and asked her how Becka was doing—I knew she would tell Becka I had done this, but I wanted to know—and Chrissy said, “Mom, don’t worry a…

“You wish you had married Margaret and gotten stuck up here in Maine?”

And he said quietly, “No. But you know what I mean. I watch Becka go through this hell, and that’s what I did with you.”

I thought about this. I said, “She’s doing a lot better than I was at that point.” It seemed to be tr…

“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning fro…

The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square into which they had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. She had once told him that she often went there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For an hour or more he wandered from …