She was leaning, not upon her husband's Ann, but upon that of her handsome younger brother, Colonel Felix Meecham, who held the umbrella high above her and contrived, even with both Anns thus occupied, somehow to stand at attention. 'Poor Mildred', as she was called by those of her acquaintance who knew, as indeed who did not know by now, the scandal of her husband's. sexual preferences. Yet Mildred was not a figure to pity.

Mildred, whom Hugh had kissed passionately once, he remembered, on a summer evening over twenty-five years ago, when they were both already sensible middle-aged married people. He wondered, as he watched her dab her eyes with a small handkerchief, whether she still recalled that curious incident.

The days of our age are three score years and ten.

Fanny had not lived out her appointed span. The cancer came sooner. And he himself had yet another three years to go. Well, Fanny had lived, she had married a distinguished man, she had borne children, she had loved her husband and her children and her grandchildren and her cats and dogs. She had been, he supposed, happy. She had not been altogether cheated. Hugh recalled the last funeral he had attended. When his eldest grandson Steve, Randall's boy, had died of polio Hugh had felt a frenzy of anger and misery which was quite unlike the resigned grief of today. Steve's death had been something gratuitous and wicked, and Hugh had raved at the universe in vain to find a place to pin that wickedness down.

Nothing had been right since Steve died. Randall had been reeling drunk at the funeral and said later that Ann had never forgiven him. It was rather perhaps that he had never forgiven Ann, upon whom by some insane and fantastic logic he had seemed to fix the blame of his bereavement.