The rest of the night was quiet. He went on his own special late rounds, gave some medications, changed a few dressings, said goodnight to the weird old building and even managed three hours of uninterrupted rest before morning, returning to bed at the end of his shift to sleep until noon.

While walking toward the house officer’s dining room for lunch he changed his mind almost in mid-stride and without bothering to go upstairs for his bathing things he left the hospital and drove to Revere Beach.

Sonia Cohen was nowhere to be seen, but the girl was lying there at the place he had first seen her, watching him as he walked toward her with sand in his brown suede shoes.

He thought he saw something—a brief flash of unguarded gladness?—before she looked at him as though she had never seen him before.

“May I sit with you?”

“No,” she said.

He clumped in his sand-filled shoes to the rockiness not far away, the place for silent admirers, where he had spread his blanket the first day. The rocks burned his flesh through the cloth of the chinos when he sat.

He just stayed there dumbly, watching her. The sun was very hot.

The girl attempted to behave as if she were alone on the beach, from time to time moving with aimless grace to enter the water, swimming with pleasure that appeared unaffected and genuine, and then leaving the water to sit again on the old U.S. Navy blanket in the golden heat.

It was the kind of early fall day that sometimes comes to New England directly from the tropics. He sat beneath the beating sun and felt the juices flow from his pores until they dampened his kinky close-cropped hair, rolled down his cheeks in drops like rain and caused his clothing to stick to his body.

He had missed lunch. By three o’clock his head felt hollow and light, a cinder burnt weightless by the great searing sun. His eyes smarted from his own salt. When he kept them open now he saw three girls who moved in graceful unison, like a smart modern ballet team. Periodic strabismus, he told himself, thinking how wonderfully efficient the eye muscles ordinarily are.

Shortly after three-thirty she gave up and fled as she had on the day before. This time, however, he followed her.

He was waiting outside the bath-house when she came out, wearing a yellow cotton dress now and carrying the blanket and her bathing things. He went to meet her.

“Look,” she said.

He saw that she was afraid.

“Please,” he said. “I’m not a pervert or a pimp or anything like that. My name’s Spurgeon Robinson. I’m respectable, extremely—even dully, but I don’t dare take a chance that I won’t meet you again. There’s nobody here to introduce us.”