But he wasn’t a stranger, because what stranger would have known about Snowy? This is precisely where the story finally begins to make sense: daunted at the last minute by the task he had been sent to perform, the man had bolstered his courage, or really his effrontery, his insolence, his duplicity, with a few drinks first. He must have thought that a show of drunkenness would have made it easier for him to approach me and draw me into an ostensibly spontaneous conversation, but he overdid it, became actually drunk. The rendezvous had been fixed; whoever sent him knew I was entering the park, on my way to the bench I’d picked out as my own, and that it might be a long time, weeks, before I came back again to that spot, which had to be that very spot and that only, that only... the spot where he would sound me out, a selected, a carefully selected and isolated spot where he would sound me out, find out just what I know, or no, they knew that already—the point, as I have already determined, to take Snowy away from me.

The thought of Snowy washes over me. All my love for her, incessantly reviving, overwhelming me again. A scrap of lace lying bright in a shop window, the ideal perfume of blooming wisteria, the intimate cry of the mourning dove, and all my love for her revives. This is what had to be prevented, but the game was dangerous; it backfired, and fully resurrected the love that I was born to give to her. I’d never forgotten her, no matter what anyone might have thought, any more than I could ever have forgotten the terror of what was done to her, that I alone saw, no matter what anyone else says. They’ve even written a book about it, to discredit me, and even then, they couldn’t help making it beautiful or showing me in my true light.

I see her rushing to embrace her dying mother on her deathbed. Luminous in the shadowy sickroom, her face mingled anguish and beauty to stop the heart, and to dominate my memory like a religious emblem. Where was I? In my mind’s eye, it’s almost as if I had been standing like a ghost submerged in the wall by the bed, but then I must have been looking in through a window—and, now that I think of it, I do recall the window frame and the white of the wall outside, crawling with moonlit columns of ants. I was a boy her age then. Perhaps I stood on a rock or a low wall. That might account for my elevated point of view.