Hubert’s eyes were on the path. Children’s legs raced into his vision and disappeared as the small boys and girls chased one another across the path and around the benches. He dodged to avoid knocking down a very small girl in a white dress and white boots who stamped slowly and unsteadily along by herself and kept herself upright by embracing the empty air in front of her with open arms. As he stepped aside to avoid the child, Hubert saw Rose’s skirt move as she walked along beside him. In the sunlight, in the navy blue skirt, her slender hips appeared commanding and alien, and she was his, and if Hubert had been told at that moment that Helen of Troy had come back to earth and was called Rose he would not have denied it. Behind him a woman screamed, “Come back here, Paddy Mernagh, till I wring your neck!” Hubert thought of Rose and the future, and his thought was all of innocence and of the necessity of earning enough to enable them to hold their heads up and never have to give thanks to anybody for anything as long as they lived.

Hubert was approaching the corner of Grafton Street from which he had begun his walk around the square, and he thought that if he had time he might run across and take a look into the park to see what changes might have been made in there. All these years, and he had not been in there. He wondered why he had never taken John into the park when John was little. Maybe Rose had taken John in there. She might have, when they were in town to buy things. It would be a shame if John had never played there, and he was nearly certain that John never had. He wouldn’t ask Rose about that. If John had never been taken to play in the park, Hubert didn’t want to know of it. He was sorry now that he had made the effort to remember the exact number of years it had been since he had been in the park. It was thirty-three years since he had been in there. He had not been in there since the last Sunday he had gone there with Rose, their first Sunday in the house. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could spend thirty years in Dublin without once going in and out of Stephen’s Green Park, but he was a man of habit, and he always went straight home after work. Thirty-three years ago. He was twenty-eight then. He decided to cross the street at once and go into the park at the next entrance.