All afternoon Fred Starratt wandered about—­sometimes dawdling defiantly, sometimes dropping into a brisk pace, but at every turn his new-found shadow followed at an inconspicuous distance.  The afternoon sun was gracious, tinged with a pleasant coolness, and far to the west a blue-gray fog bank waited for evening to let down the day’s warm barriers.  Fred Starratt’s thoughts were abrupt and purposeless, 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 heralding the ocean.  He quickened his step.  Already the breeze was tearing across the unscreened spaces and carrying damp wisps of fog with it.  As he found his steps swinging into the ocean highway he turned and looked back.  His discreet pursuer had disappeared.  There was not a soul in sight!