Fanshaw felt himself flush as he walked with slow strides along the turf by the river. And Wenny had loved Nan. Perhaps it was through his death they had been brought together. The ways of destiny, Fuerza del Destino, by Verdi. Perhaps they could afford an apartment in one of these places by the river. The Strathcona. Fun it would be decorating it. And Wenny had loved her. That's how I felt towards him, I suppose. No harm, now that he's dead. This afternoon the Attic gleam of rowers in the sun, swallows circling in a blue sky glittering as with mica; if I could paint I would do him against such a background, hair curling crisp about his eager narrow forehead, eyes laughing, lips winesmudged and full, brownly naked like the Bacchus in that picture by Velasquez, defying the world. Fanshaw was twirling some pink clover blossoms between his fingers, occasionally sniffing at them. The sense of Wenny's presence became suddenly intense to him, as if he could feel the hard muscle of Wenny's shoulder against his arm, as when they had walked together. He closed his eyes for dizziness. He opened his eyes and looked about him. Round a bend in the river at the end of a silvery blue reach was a bridge and beyond the fantastic pile of the Abattoir with its tall bottle-shaped chimney. A rough smell of singed hides came down the wind. Fanshaw turned into a path up the hill towards a shrubbery behind which showed the crowded obelisks and crosses of the cemetery, crossed a wooden bar and found himself wandering among neatly laid off grass plots and gravestones with the dust of the stone cutting still on them. He passed a mock orange in bloom and remembered how he used to breathe deep the fragrance from the bush at the corner of his mother's lawn in Omaha until he almost swooned from it. That fancy that Wenny had once had that all the tombstones ought to be effaced and cemeteries turned into amusement parks with dancehalls and rollercoasters and toodling calliopes. There was a smell of lilacs ... When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. Perhaps that was what had made Wenny say that the smell of lilacs made him think of death. Then he was staring at the newest stone: DAVID WENDELL: AET. 23 The Rev. Wendell, as Nan called him, had thought the Latin was appropriate to a scholar. On the reddish mound new grass fine as hair was sprouting. How little any of it had to do with Wenny. On the next grave a stalk of frail paper-white Madonna lilies trembled in the wind. It was in the time of lilies Pico della Mirandola had come to Florence and in the time of lilies he died, having failed in his great work of reconciling Christ and Apollo. Wenny would have been like that. O, if more people had only known him, if he had lived where there was an atmosphere of accomplishment instead of futility, his name might have rung like Pico's to the last syllable of recorded time.