Again they seemed to me to be without age. They were like all lovers, while they held hands, their faces joined, trembling and blind, in the shadow of a kiss. . . . . . They broke off, and disengaged themselves from their embrace, whose meaning they had not yet learned. They talked with their innocent lips. About what? About the past, which was so near and so short. They were leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance. They spoke of a house and a garden where they had both lived. The house absorbed them. It was surrounded by a garden wall, so that from the road all you could see was the tip of the eaves, and you couldn't tell what was going on inside of it. They prattled: "The rooms, when we were little and they were so big--" "It was easier to walk there than anywhere else." To hear the children talk, you would have thought there was something benevolent and invisible, something like the good God of the past, behind those walls. She hummed an air she had heard there, and said that music was easier to remember than people. They dropped back into the past easily and naturally. They wrapped themselves up in their memories as though they were cold. "The other day, just before we left, I took a candle and walked alone through the rooms, which scarcely woke up to watch me pass." In the garden, so prim and well kept, they thought only of the flowers, and little else. They saw the pool, the shady walk, and the cherry tree, which, in winter when the lawn was white, they made believe had too many blossoms--snow blossoms. The day before they had still been in the garden, like brother and sister. Now life seemed to have grown serious all at once, and they no longer knew how to play. I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it. She sat up straight. "I don't want to remember any more," she said. And he: "I don't want us to be like each other any more. I don't want us to be brother and sister any more." Gradually their eyes opened. "To touch nothing but each other's hands," he muttered, trembling. "Brother--sister--that's nothing." It had come--the hour of beautiful, troubled decisions, of forbidden fruits. They had not belonged to each other before. The hour had come when they sought to be all in all to each other. They were a little self-conscious, a little ashamed of themselves already. A few days before, in the evening, it had given them profound pleasure to disobey their parents and go out of the garden although they had been forbidden to leave it. "Grandmother came to the top of the steps and called to us to come in."