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hadn’t noticed that, while she was writing, her kettle had once again boiled, steamed ferociously, and cooled. The little house underneath it was now nothing more than a pile of ash.

T hat’s the way it was with Patrick. His response to stimuli was so finely tuned that even a change in geography might disorient him. The act of walking in the woods was made of a texture so different from the act of walking in the orchards that he knew some minutes would have to pass before he could relax enough to observe the birds he had come there to see, to collect wildflowers for his album.
    He had walked out of the bright blaze of the orchard, across the road and the streetcar tracks, into the dark, cool forest. He was alone. His mind was adjusting to the change of light in the same way that the retinae of his eyes adjusted. Lenses opening in shadow.
    Eventually he began to use the fieldglasses again as he had in the orchards, to follow the flights of birds. Moving the circular image across the trees in pursuit of a thrush, his vision brushed against a woman’s face and it took several moments for him to accept what he had seen. He simply could not believe that she was real, could not, at first, cope with the fact of her being there. He refocused the instrument and moved it carefully back to the spot where her pale face had flickered. But by then she had disappeared. Finally, he spotted a portion of her blue dress, barely visible through the trees, and another piece of fabric of a tartan-like nature.
    Patrick moved, quietly, a few feet closer. Crouching behind a sumac bush he, once again, brought the glasses up to his eyes. Now he could see her more clearly, her downcast face, the sunlight on her dark yellow hair. In this setting, surrounded by the yellow-green foliage of late spring and seated in blue shadows, she looked to him like a woman in a painting, as though she had been dropped into the middle of the scene for decorative purposes, or to play a part in a legend. Excited by these associations, he moved closer again. All the wildflower specimens he had collected fell, unnoticed, out of his pocket. A pink trillium was squashed under his right foot.
    But now all he could see was the bottom of her blue skirt and her two leather boots, crossed at the ankles. Bending down he stepped, cautiously, several feet to the left and, safely disguised by a Scotch pine, he discovered with joy that the whole woman was within his range. She was sitting on a plaid blanket with her back against the trunk of a poplar, reading a leather-bound book. Her expression was one of great concentration.
    Behind her stood a large white tent and directly in front of her a small campfire burned, causing a tarnished kettle to issue clouds of steam. She was young, slim and, even while seated, seemed to be tall in stature. Through the glasses he could see the wisps of hair, which had escaped the bun at the back of her neck, play around her forehead and cheeks in the breeze. She lifted one hand from the cover of the book in order to turn a page. “My God,” Patrick whispered as the title was revealed –
The Ring and the Book
by Robert Browning.
    The lenses in Patrick’s eyes and in his mind were wide open. The naturalist in him dissolved in the shadows. When the pursued thrush flew across the path of his glasses he completely ignored it. Instead, he watched the woman now with intense curiosity, scrutinizing the details of her dress, the rings on her slender hands, taking note of the lace on her collar, the gold band on her left hand. Mud on her boots andon the hem of her dress indicated that she had been climbing on the bank. The apron that partly covered the skirt suggested that she must have been occupied with some chore before deciding to come to that exact spot, before deciding to read. Patrick was mildly amused when he discovered that she was drinking tea and, even more so, when he noted that her cup and saucer were made of English bone china. She was, he