It might be a hell of a world, but it was a beautiful day, clear as a bell and cloudless, and so warm that Grace, armed with binoculars and a stick, needed no coat over her suit. By the time she and Edward were through the iron gates of Mt. Auburn cemetery the sun had reached just the point in its afternoon course when the slanting rays flowed through the blood-red dogwood leaves and the brilliant gold maples and set off each berry or sharply cut Japanese maple leaf in peculiar theatrical brilliance like a pre-Raphaelite painting. True aficionados, they did not need to decide where to go, but walked without speaking down their usual path into a round green amphitheater entirely lined with Grecian temples, or variations on the theme of the Greek temple, family crypts set into the hillside. It was like a small classical city, a slightly cluttered Claude or Poussin, as Edward had once remarked.

“Why no one ever comes here, I can’t imagine,” Grace said, her bright glancing eyes taking it in, the casual air of the planting among the white tombs, that mass of rhododendron, for instance, and in the distance a stand of pines. “It’s the most beautiful thing in Cambridge.”

“It has everything—even a kind of society.” Edward smiled, as Grace took off with her usual insatiable curiosity to peer through the iron-grilled door into one of the tombs, where she could see a little iron chair sitting there in the dark beside a marble table.

“Even a swallow’s nest,” she said, coming back in triumph. But it was all, she knew, slightly staged by both of them, this walk which was the conscious repetition of so many walks in every season, when they had been carefree, militant, happy—she stopped still. The word “happy” was too dreadful really beside Edward’s haunted face. For her sake he was making a great effort to be genial and appreciative, as if she were giving him the cemetery this afternoon as a present and he must make appropriate thanks. But she knew without his telling her that he hadn’t slept, even as they walked on into a small dark valley, narrow and enclosed, so that the trees planted on the hilltop soared to amazing heights, seemed to be about to take off into the sky.

“Look at that oak, Edward! What splendor!” The words echoed back as she turned to him, standing passive, rooted, looking at the oak obediently, but not seeing it.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s very fine.”