He looked over at her bed. There was no flare on the ceiling tonight, no lighted cigarette, no smoking in the dark to show him she was still awake. She was asleep; he could see the outlines of her figure. At once the image of the angry woman vanished and in its place he saw the girl he had loved and married. As a bride she had been the world’s freshest and most delightful creature; if he was to have nothing in his life again, he had had that, and he would never forget it. How much of that love could they recapture? None, probably; but he loved her still, she loved him, and if they hung onto that, it might be fortification enough for age and middle age which lay just ahead of them.—In spite of the presence of youth all that day, John Grandin was still unable to think of himself, at forty-­four, as middle-­aged.

What had happened seemed all the sadder, somehow, because of the bride and bridegroom who had yesterday entered their lives, if only fleetingly. He was never merely sentimental about marriage, but it did seem a shame that the Haumans had been in on it at all, even though they were probably unaware of the chilling atmosphere of a relationship so unlike their own. They were in love, and consequently saw no one but themselves . . . And again he lost himself in reverie about the Marine captain and his bride . . .

. . . As he thought of Billie and Cliff on the beach that morning—of what a vivid sight they had made and what pleasure it had given him—he couldn’t help wondering again when, and on what beachhead, that splendid body of Cliff’s would lie rotting, and how soon Billie would console herself with children or another man or her own mother. What would Billie remember of Cliff; was she at all aware of what she had now and what she might lose? And having lost it, what would it mean to her? Would it mean more to her, for example, than her own grief, or the fact that she was a Marine captain’s widow and her dead husband a hero—something her girl friends would always be conscious of and point out? Would this small neighborhood-­fame take the place of her love—take the place of Cliff, too, in time?

But this was idle romantic speculation. Nothing mattered but that Cliff would, in all probability, die. He was the hero headed for the fulfillment of death, which was as it should be: Grandin’s­ childhood hero out of literature and mythology. In simple artistic justice he would not have arrested that inevitable course or have it otherwise; and yet, in Cliff’s brief transit, he wanted to take something out of that life before it passed from sight forever. What that something could be, he had no idea; for clearly Cliff had nothing for him or anyone.