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Richard’s feet. His red tongue showed, his black eyes glittered, his whole small body waggled furiously. “Hello, Willie,” said Richard, and scooped up the dog who rolled his eyes in lavish disregard for his usual taciturnity and strove to lick Richard’s face.
    â€œHe’s been hunting.” Myra reached over to pull a burr from his shaggy stomach. “Usually he’s waiting and listening for your car.”
    Richard gave the dog a pat and put him down on the sand and took out cigarettes which he offered Myra. He said, holding his lighter for her, “I’m sorry you are going to leave.”
    Perhaps because in her heart she so wanted other words said in a different way, it seemed flat and perfunctory. So her own reply sounded as flat and as perfunctory. “I’m sorry, too.”
    He waited a moment, almost as if he were waiting for her to say more, then he turned. “Shall we walk?” he said, and picked up a piece of driftwood to throw for Willie.
    Willie waited, bounding, quivering, his eyes fastened on the stick in Richard’s hand. Richard said, “It’s extraordinarily difficult to look at things—and people—objectively. I happened to see the Governor a month ago, in a restaurant. I left rather than run the risk of a chance meeting. He was only a public servant, performing his duty. To me he was the man who had risen to that office in a large degree because he had sent my wife to prison.”
    He threw the stick, harder and farther than he intended. Willie missed its flight, was bewildered, bounced, seeking it, this way and that. Richard said, looking straight ahead, “I heard somebody speak of Webb Manders one time this winter. To me he wasn’t the Webb Manders I know, good-natured, friendly; he was Jack Manders’, brother, the eyewitness. The man who stood there in the witness stand, giving the testimony that actually convicted Alice. I’m an adult. I realize the circumstances. Nevertheless …”
    Willie came back, apologetic, panting, without the stick. Richard stooped to find another, and threw it, not so hard this time and Willie scrambled after it.
    He had never talked of Alice and the thing that had happened in the gracious, charming room they had just left. Why, she thought with a dull sense of something like anti-climax, did he do so now? The portion of her life which like a thread had been caught and woven briefly into the pattern and fabric of the house that stood above her, pink and lovely against the twilight sky, had come to an end. Another life lay before her now and Richard was to be no part of that life.
    Again an airplane came from the north and Myra could see it riding high. Its lights were like small meteors hurtling through the quiet evening sky. Richard said then, suddenly and harshly, “What I’m trying to say is that I’m discovering, only now, that there is no past. It is always here, in the present. We are never free.” He tossed his cigarette toward the slowly breaking waves. “It is inescapable. It is a part of life. Forever.”
    Because he still loved Alice.
    She had never thought of that. It was incredible that she had not, for she had thought of everything else. So how could she have been so stupid, so childish as not to realize that Richard, naturally, was still in love with Alice!
    And why not? They had married; she knew little of that marriage except that they had both been very young, but he must have loved her then and he was not a man to change.
    That, of course, was why the beautiful and gently smiling bride in her pearls and her lace veil, Alice’s portrait, still hung in the gold-and-ivory drawing room! Richard still loved the bride, and the woman she had become.
    And then the inevitable, logical corollary of that thought caught at her as if it had hands and it too was a question.
    Was it possible that Richard believed Alice innocent?
    She tried to marshall facts.