The cars could be heard swishing along the main road. She put her cheek back on her knee and stroked her palms over the grass on either side of her. She said, apparently with total irrelevance, “It was my birthday.”

“What?”

“I hadn’t heard from you for weeks. And it was my birthday.” She sighed. “That’s all. I know it doesn’t help.”

“A form of celebration, I take it?”

She turned her face away.

After a moment he said, “The photograph you sent me, then—he took that?”

“What photograph?”

“A photograph taken up here. On your birthday, you said.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.… I’m sorry. Yes.”

“Kate,” he said, aghast, “don’t you have any sensibilities at all?”

“Well,” she said helplessly, “you kept asking for a photograph.”

“I hardy imagined you would go to such lengths to obtain one.… How could you send that to me?”

She made an ineffectual gesture toward him. “It was the only one I’ve ever liked.” Her voice, inexcusably, carried the suggestion of a smile.

“It didn’t look a bit like you,” he said crossly. They sat for a while without speaking. Presently he said, with an air of monumental acceptance, “Perhaps this is the customary thing. Perhaps one has no right to ask loyalty.”

“Perhaps one has no right to expect it,” she said. “But I think one must ask it.”

He was silent again, making it clear that she had forfeited her right to adjudicate human behavior. He could tell, from the interruptions of her breathing, that she had begun to cry. He said unyieldingly, “Now Kate, pull yourself together,” and added, as though tears were by nature frivolous, “this is serious.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” she said, not raising her hands from the grass but rubbing her tears off on her skirt with motions of her head. “It’s only because I’m tired. I couldn’t sleep last night. In fact, I felt quite shaky all day.”

He doubted this, but dared not say so. Once, years ago, he had expressed skepticism about an illness of hers, and she had promptly and irrefutably fainted, in a shop; since then she had been, in this respect, unchallengeable. Now, however, having dried her eyes, she began to cry all over again and with such a suppressed, pathetic sound that he could no longer ignore it. He said, in a milder tone, “Kate, please stop.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, “but it’s the way you speak to me.”

“But, dear,” he protested, with a sense of injustice, “I can’t pretend this is nothing. I’m only trying to make you understand how much it matters to me.”

She looked up at him in the darkness. “I can’t help feeling,” she said, and again he could hear her smile, “that you might have accomplished your object with a quarter of the exertion.” She gave a sharp sniff. “I don’t have a handkerchief.”