He followed her into the garden, feeling rather like a child with whom other children will not play, and who is allowed, for that reason, to trail about after the grown-ups.

Marina put her implements down by a bed of dahlias and drew on a pair of blackened gardening gloves. She knelt to examine the fallen plants, and after a moment looked up at Francis, shielding her eyes from the sun with her gloved hand. “The sticks,” she said. “Would you mind? In the shed at the back of the house. But not the short ones,” she called as he turned away. “The long ones, in the corner near the door.”

Francis walked down the path, the sun pressing on his head and shoulders. The dim shed, smelling of earth and fertilizers, was cool after the garden. In the corner near the door were a hoe, a rake, a stack of pots, and an encrusted trowel. The only sticks he could find, on a shelf, were too short for Marina’s purpose, but after a hasty search in the half darkness he took them back into the garden.

Marina did not hear him return, and he stood looking at her as she bent over the plants. All her actions were complete and reassuring, all her attitudes graceful and yielding. As she worked, she watched her own hands with a reflective smile, and her hair fell forward across her cheek and swung with the movements of her arms. It occurred to Francis that he had never been so close to beauty. His need for deliverance, for human comfort, was so great that for a moment he thought he had actually taken Marina in his arms, and could feel under his fingers the worn material of her dress and the delicate bones of her shoulders.

“Oh, Marina.” He fell on his knees beside her, his hands still full of the sticks from the shed. “Marina.”

She looked up abruptly. Kneeling, they stared at each other.

His eyes dazzled. He lifted his closed hands. “I could only find the small sticks.”

She was very pale. For an instant, he could imagine how she might look if she were ever to lose her composure.

She sat back on her heels. “They must be there,” she said. “I’ll go and look.” She got up and left him on his knees on the grass, his hands extended and full of short, blunt sticks.