Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day before the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St. Martin’s summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of those June Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer blue to a wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer’s image in this wraith of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He wondered if Alan were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the sun down from Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a summer term recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead days. Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa. Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to know them so well: Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptæque puellæ. There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases: Lapsa cadunt folia ... ubi frigidus annus ... et ... terris apricis. Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation of other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park would soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet because those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery of youth, to the still unexpressed and inviolate heart of a period that was forever overpast, Michael could not bring himself to destroy their sanctity with sentimental reminiscence. However, there had been comedy and absurdity also, perhaps rather more fit for exhumation now than those deeper moments. “Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?” he asked. “Rather,” said Alan, and they both smiled. “Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst out laughing and had to rush out of the room?” “Rather,” said Alan. “Boys _are_ ridiculous, aren’t they?” “Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs. Merivale?” Michael queried. “I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at anything,” said Alan. “And yet do you realize that we’re only talking of eight years ago? Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the time when that wedding took place.” To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life Michael’s calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive mortality. “You’ll be writing epitaphs next,” said Alan, in rather an aggrieved voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during the silence. “At any rate,” Michael said. “You can congratulate yourself upon not having wasted time.”