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north bank of the lake and at its shallow rim a cluster of waterfowl, pochards and mandarins and ablack swan, squabbling over the spilled slices from a cut loaf.
    She crossed the Long Bridge and paused for a while to look at the heron perched on one of the island trees. It should have been possible to turn left and head for the Cumberland Gate, but there was no way through.
    She was learning that this was characteristic of the park, perhaps inevitable in a design based on a circle within a circle that were not concentric. Paths seldom led where you thought they would, and it was very easy, especially in this vicinity, to take what you thought were all the right directions yet find yourself heading back for the zoo and St. John’s Wood. Through the Looking Glass was what it was like, the bit where Alice notices that the path that seems to lead straight to the garden does not and is afraid of going back through the glass into the old room. I, at any rate, shall not go back to the old room, the old life, Mary thought, and with that she came out into the Inner Circle by the Open Air Theatre.
    It was a short distance from there, through the golden gates and along Chester Road, to the Broad Walk. The new fountains were playing. Flowers spilled over the rims of the lion tazzas and the Roman vases. The flowerbeds, formal rectangles that flanked the wide path, were filled with polyanthus in bloom, with pansies and yellow jonquils. All the way along, from Park Square to Chester Road, and up beyond where there were no flowers but only trees and a certain wildness, seats faced each other, most of them occupied by two or three people. But on the seat nearest to the point where the road crossed the Broad Walk a man was sitting alone.
    People of his sort always did sit alone, unless another of their kind joined them. No one would choose to sit on the same seat as he. Mary, approaching along the path from the west, sought about in her mind as she had often done before, for the right word for him. Dosser? Street person? Street sleeper? Not beggar, he wasn’t begging. Not tramp, that was from her grandmother’s time. Perhaps there was no word and perhaps there should be none.
    He was reading. That made him different, set him apart. He seemed oblivious to everything and everyone, concentrating on his book. The barrow that contained his possessions rested against the metal arm of the seat. From the rag tied round his neck to the boots on his feet, his clothes were well-worn denim, rumpled wool, and threadbare polyester. He wore a dark-colored quilted jerkin. His hair was dark, the thick bushy beard that covered the greater part of his face iron-gray. She thought she had seen him somewhere before without being able to remember where. It was his hands that recalled this previous sighting or meeting. They were long, narrow, beautiful hands, sun-browned but smooth, and on the left one was a gold wedding ring.
    He looked up as she passed and for a moment, infinitesimal, fleeting, their eyes met. His were blue, a strong sea-blue. He lowered his eyes almost immediately to his book and turned the page in a precise controlled movement. Trying to remember where she had seen him that first time—in Baker Street? Outside Madame Tussaud’s? But she hardly ever went that way—Mary walked along the path where the gingko trees grow, the Chinese Maidenhair trees, toward the Cumberland Gate. Had he asked her for money? Had he perhaps been selling the
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    At the sound of her key in the lock, Gushi made three sharp barks. She called his name and he came running. If he was tired from his walk he gave no sign of it. She squatted down and he jumped into her arms, nestling there and burying his chrysanthemum face in her neck and shoulder.
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    Mary Jago may have failed to remember where she had previously seen Roman Ashton, but he had no trouble in placing her. She was the young woman who, arriving two hours earlier than usual at the