He dreamed that he woke up in the night to the sound of the slow, watchful breathing that he heard every night in his room as he tried to fall asleep. It came from outside his window now. Someone was climbing the house. A tall figure in a great cape like a bat's wings sprang suddenly into the room.

"I'm here," said the figure matter-offactly.

Guy jumped from his bed to fight him. "Who are you?" He saw it was Bruno.

Bruno resisted him rather than fought back. If Guy used his utmost strength, he could just pin Bruno's shoulders to the floor, and always in the recurrent dream, Guy had to use his utmost strength. Guy held Bruno to the floor with his knees and strangled him, but Bruno kept grinning up at him as if he felt nothing.

"You," Bruno answered finally.

Guy awakened heavy-headed and perspiring. He sat up higher, vigilantly guarding his empty room. There were slimily wet sounds in the room now, as of a snake crawling through the cement court below, slapping its moist coils against the walls. Then suddenly he recognized the sound as that of rain, a gentle, silvery summer rain, and sank back again on his pillow. He began to cry softly. He thought of the rain, rushing at a slant to the earth. It seemed to say: Where are the spring plants to water? Where is the new life that depends on me? Where is the green vine, Anne, as we saw love in our youth? he had written last night on the crumpled paper. The rain would find the new life awaiting it, depending on it. What fell in his court was only its excess. Where is the green vine, Annea He lay with his eyes open until the dawn eased its fingertips onto the sill, like the stranger who had sprung in. Like Bruno. Then he got up and turned on his lights, drew the shades, and went back to his work.

Twenty-nine.

Guy slammed his foot on the brake pedal, but the car leapt, screaming, toward the child. There was a tinny clatter of the bicycle falling. Guy got out and ran around the car, banged his knee excruciatingly on the front bumper, and dragged the child up by his shoulders.

"I'm okay," the little boy said.

"Is he all right, Guy?" Anne ran up, white as the child.

"I think so." Guy gripped the bicycle's, front wheel with his knees and straightened the handlebars, feeling the child's curious eyes on his own violently trembling hands.

"Thanks," said the boy.

Guy watched him mount the bicycle and pedal off as if he watched a miracle. He looked at Anne and said quietly, with a shuddering sigh, "I can't drive anymore today."

"All right," she replied, as quietly as he, but there was a suspicion in her eyes, Guy knew, as she turned to go around to the driver's seat.

Guy apologized to the Faulkners as he got back into the car, and they murmured something about such things happening to every driver now and then. But Guy felt their real silence behind him, a silence of shock and horror. He had seen the boy coming down the side road. The boy had stopped for him, but Guy had swerved the car toward him as if he had intended to hit him. Had he? Tremulously, he lighted a cigarette. Nothing but bad coordination, he told himself, he had seen it a hundred times in the past two weeksa"collisions with revolving doors, his inability even to hold a pen against a ruler, and so often the feeling he wasn't here, doing what he was doing. Grimly he reestablished what he was doing now, driving in Anne's car up to Alton to see the new house. The house was done. Anne and her mother had put the drapes up last week. It was Sunday, nearly noon. Anne had told him she had gotten a nice letter from his mother yesterday, and that his mother had sent her three crocheted aprons and a lot of homemade preserves to start their kitchen shelves. Could he remember all that? All he seemed to remember was the sketch of the Bronx hospital in his pocket, that he hadn't told Anne about yet. He wished he could go away somewhere and do nothing but work, see no one, not even Anne. He stole a glance at her, at her coolly lifted face with the faint arch in the bridge of the nose. Her thin strong hands swung the wheel expertly into a curve and out. Suddenly he was sure she loved her car more than she loved him.

"If anybody's hungry, speak up now," Anne said. "This little store's the last place for miles."

But no one was hungry.

"I expect to be asked for dinner at least once a year, Anne," her father said. "Maybe a brace of ducks or some quail. I hear there's some good hunting around here. Any good with a gun, Guy?"

Anne turned the car into the road that led to the house.

"Fair, sir," Guy said finally, stammering twice. His heart was flogging him to run, he could still it only by running, he was sure.

"Guy!" Anne smiled at him. Stopping the car, she whispered to him, "Have a nip when you get in the house. There's a bottle of brandy in the kitchen." She touched his wrist, and Guy jerked his hand back, involuntarily.

He must, he thought, have a brandy or something. But he knew also that he would not take anything.

Mrs. Faulkner walked beside him across the new lawn. "It's simply beautiful, Guy. I hope you're proud of it."

Guy nodded. It was finished, he didn't have to imagine it anymore as he had in the brown bureau of the hotel room in Mexico. Anne had wanted Mexican tiles in the kitchen. So many things she wore from time to time were Mexican. A belt, a handbag, huarachas. The long embroidered skirt that showed now below her tweed coat was Mexican. He felt he must have chosen the Hotel Montecarlo so that dismal pink-and-brown room and Bruno's face in the brown bureau would haunt him the rest of his life.

It was only a month until their marriage now. Four more Friday nights, and Anne would sit in the big square green chair by the fireplace, her voice would call to him from the Mexican kitchen, they would work together in the studio upstairs. What right had he to imprison her with himself? He stood staring at their bedroom, vaguely aware that it seemed cluttered, because Anne had said she wanted their bedroom "not modern."

"Don't forget to thank Mother for the furniture, will you?" she whispered to him. "Mother gave it to us, you know."

The cherry bedroom set, of course. He remembered her telling him that morning at breakfast, remembered his bandaged hand, and Anne in the black dress she had worn to Helen's party. But when he should have said something about the furniture, he didn't, and then it seemed too late. They must know something is the matter, he felt. Everyone in the world must know. He was only somehow being reprieved, being saved for some weight to fall upon him and annihilate him.

"Thinking about a new job, Guy?" Mr. Faulkner asked, offering him a cigarette.

Guy had not seen his figure there when he stepped onto the side porch. With a sense of justifying himself, he pulled the folded paper from his pocket and showed it to him, explained it to him. Mr. Faulkner's bushy, gray and brown eyebrows came down thoughtfully. But he's not listening to me at all, Guy thought. He's bending closer only to see my guilt that is like a circle of darkness about me.

"Funny Anne didn't say anything to me about it," Mr. Faulkner said.

"I'm saving it."

"Oh," Mr. Faulkner chuckled. "A wedding present?"

Later, the Faulkners took the car and went back for sandwiches from the little store. Guy was tired of the house. He wanted Anne to walk with him up the rock hill.

"In a minute," she said. "Come here." She stood in front of the tall stone fireplace. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face, a little apprehensive, but still glowing with her pride in their new house. "Those are getting deeper, you know," she told him, drawing her fingertip down the hollow in his cheek. "I'm going to make you eat."

"Maybe need a little sleep," he murmured. He had told her that lately his work demanded long hours. He had told her, of all things, that he was doing some agency jobs, hack jobs, as Myers did, in order to earn some money.

"Darling, we'rea"we're well off. What on earth's troubling you?"

And she had asked him half a dozen times if it was the wedding, if he wanted not to marry her. If she asked him again, he might say yes, but he knew she would not ask it now, in front of their fireplace. "Nothing's troubling me," he said quickly.

"Then will you please not work so hard?" she begged him, then spontaneously, out of her own joy and anticipation, hugged him to her.

Automaticallya"as if it were nothing at all, he thoughta"he kissed her, because he knew she expected him to. She will notice, he thought, she always notices the slightest difference in a kiss, and it had been so long since he had kissed her. When she said nothing, it seemed to him only that the change in him was simply too enormous to mention.

Thirty.

Guy crossed the kitchen and turned at the back door. "Awfully thoughtless of me to invite myself on the cook's night out."

"What's thoughtless about it? You'll just fare as we do on Thursday nights, that's all. " Mrs. Faulkner brought him a piece of the celery she was washing at the sink. "But Hazel's going to be disappointed she wasn't here to make the shortcake herself. You'll have to do with Anne's tonight."

Guy went out. The afternoon was still bright with sun, though the picket fence cast long oblique bars of shadow over the crocus and iris beds. He could just see Annie's tied-back hair and the pale green of her sweater beyond a crest in the rolling sea of lawn. Many times he had gathered mint and watercress there with Anne, from the stream that flowed out of the woods where he had fought Bruno. Bruno is past, he reminded himself, gone, vanished. Whatever method Gerard had used, he had made Bruno afraid to contact him.

He watched Mr. Faulkner's neat black car enter the driveway and roll slowly into the open garage. What was he doing here, he asked himself suddenly, where he deceived everyone, even the colored cook who liked to make shortcake for him because, once perhaps, he had praised her dessert? He moved into the shelter of the pear tree, where neither Anne nor her father would easily see him. If he should step out of Anne's life, he thought, what difference would it make to her? She had not given up all her old friends, hers and Teddy's set, the eligible young men, the handsome young men who played at polo and, rather harmlessly, at the night clubs before they entered their father's business and married one of the beautiful young girls who decorated their country clubs. Anne was different, of course, or she wouldn't have been attracted to him in the first place. She was not one of the beautiful young girls who worked at a career for a couple of years just to say they had done it, before they married one of the eligible young men. But wouldn't she have been just the same, herself, without him? She had often told him he was her inspiration, he and his own ambition, but she had had the same talent, the same drive the day he met her, and wouldn't she have gone on? And wouldn't another man, like himself but worthy of her, have found her? He began to walk toward her.

"I'm almost done," she called to him. "Why didn't you come sooner?"

"I hurried," he said awkwardly.

"You've been leaning against the house ten minutes."

A sprig of watercress was floating away on the stream, and he sprang to rescue it. He felt like a possum, scooping it up. "I think I'll take a job soon, Anne."

She looked up, astoundedly." A job? You mean with a firm?"

It was a phrase to be used about other architects, "a job with a firm." He nodded, not looking at her. "I feel like it. Something steady with a good salary."

"Steady?" She laughed a little. "With a year's work ahead of you at the hospital?"

"I won't need to be in the drafting room all the time."

She stood up. "Is it because of money? Because you're not taking the hospital money?"

He turned away from her and took a big step up the moist bank. "Not exactly," he said through his teeth. "Maybe partly." He had decided weeks ago to give his fee back to the Department of Hospitals after he paid his staff.

"But you said it wouldn't matter, Guy. We both agreed wea"you could afford it."

The world seemed silent all at once, listening. He watched her push a strand of her hair back and leave a smudge of wet earth on her forehead. "It won't be for long. Maybe six months, maybe a lot less."

"But why at all?"

"I feel like it!"

"Why do you feel like it? Why do you want to be a martyr, Guy?"

He said nothing.

The setting sun dropped free of the trees and poured onto them suddenly. Guy frowned deeper, shading his eye with the brow that bore the white scar from the woodsa"the scar that would always show, he thought. He kicked at a stone in the ground, without being able to dislodge it. Let her think the job was still part of his depression after the Palmyra. Let her think anything.

"Guy, I'm sorry," she said.

Guy looked at her. "Sorry?"

She came closer to him. "Sorry. I think I know what it is."

He still kept his hands in his pockets. "What do you mean?"

She waited a long while. "I thought all this, all your uneasiness after the Palmyraa"even without your knowing it, I meana"goes back to Miriam."

He twisted away abruptly."No. No, that's not it at all!" He said it so honestly, yet it sounded so like a lie! He thrust his fingers in his hair and shoved it back.

"Listen, Guy," Anne said softly and clearly, "maybe you don't want the wedding as much as you think you do. If you think that's part of it, say it, because I can take that a lot easier than this job idea. If you want to waita"stilla"or if you want to break it off entirely, I can bear it."

Her mind was made up, and had been for a long while. He could feel it at the very center of her calmness. He could give her up at this moment. The pain of that would cancel out the pain of guilt.

"Hey, there, Anne!" her father called from the back door. "Coming in soon? I need that mint!"

"Minute, Dad!" she shouted back. "What do you say, Guy?"

His tongue pressed the top of his mouth. He thought, she is the sun in my dark forest. But he couldn't say it. He could only say, "I can't saya""

"Wella"I want you now more than ever, because you need me now more than ever." She pressed the mint and watercress into his hand. "Do you want to take this to Dad? And have a drink with him. I have to change my clothes." She turned and went off toward the house, not fast, but much too fast for Guy to try to follow her.

Guy drank several of the mint juleps. Anne's father made them the old-fashioned way, letting the sugar and bourbon and mint stand in a dozen glasses all day, getting colder and more frosted, and he liked to ask Guy if he had ever tasted better ones anywhere. Guy could feel the precise degree to which his tension lessened, but it was impossible for him to become drunk. He had tried a few times and made himself sick, without becoming drunk.

There was a moment after dusk, on the terrace with Anne, when he imagined he might not have known her any better than he had the first evening he visited her, when he suddenly felt a tremendous, joyous longing to make her love him. Then he remembered the house in Alton awaiting them after the wedding Sunday, and all the happiness he had known already with Anne rushed back to him. He wanted to protect her, to achieve some impossible goal, which would please her. It seemed the most positive, the happiest ambition he had ever known. There was a way out, then, if he could feel like this. It was only a part of himself he had to cope with, not his whole self, not Bruno, or his work. He had merely to crush the other part of himself, and live in the self he was now.

Thirty-one.

But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him. The wedding so elaborately prepared for, so festive, so pure with white lace and linen, so happily awaited by everyone, seemed the worst act of treachery he could commit, and the closer it drew, the more frantically and vainly he debated canceling it. Up to the last hour, he wanted simply to flee.

Robert Treacher, the friend of his Chicago days, telephoned his good wishes and asked if he might come to the wedding. Guy put him off with some feeble excuse. It was the Faulkners' affair, he felt, their friends, their family church, and the presence of a friend would put a hole in his armor. He had invited only Myers, who didn't mattera"since the hospital commission, he no longer shared an office with hima"Tim O'Flaherty, who couldn't come, and two or three architects from the Deems Academy, who knew his work better than they knew him. But half an hour after Treacher's call from Montreal, Guy telephoned back and asked Bob if he would be his best man.

Guy realized he had not even thought of Treacher in nearly a year, had not answered his last letter. He had not thought of Peter Wriggs, or Vic De Poyster and Gunther Hall. He had used to call on Vic and his wife in their Bleecker Street apartment, had once taken Anne there. Vic was a painter, and had sent him an invitation to his exhibit last winter, Guy remembered. He hadn't even answered. Vaguely now, he remembered that Tim had been in New York and had called him to have lunch during the period when Bruno had been haunting him by telephone, and that he had refused. The Theologica Germanica, Guy recalled, said that the ancient Germans had judged an accused man innocent or guilty by the number of friends who came forth to vouch for his character. How many would vouch for him now? He had never given a great deal of time to his friends, because they were not the kind of people who expected it, but now he felt his friends were shunning him in turn, as if they sensed without seeing him that he had become unworthy of friendship.

The Sunday morning of the wedding, walking in slow circles around Bob Treacher in the vestry of the church, Guy clung to his memory of the hospital drawings as to a single last shred of hope, the single proof that he still existed. He had done an excellent job. Bob Treacher, his friend, had praised him. He had proven to himself that he could still create.

Bob had given up trying to make conversation with him. He sat with his arms folded, with a pleasant but rather absent expression on his chubby face. Bob thought he was simply nervous. Bob didn't know how he felt, Guy knew, because however much he thought it showed, it didn't. And that was the hell, that one's life could so easily be total hypocrisy. This was the essence, his wedding and his friend, Bob Treacher, who no longer knew him. And the little stone vestry with the high grilled window, like a prison cell. And the murmur of voices outside, like the selfrighteous murmurings of a mob impatient to storm the prison and wreak justice.

"You didn't by any chance bring a bottle."

Bob jumped up. "I certainly did. It's weighing me down and I completely forgot it." He set the bottle on the table and waited for Guy to take it. Bob was about forty-five, a man of modest but sanguine temperament, with an indelible stamp of contented bachelorhood and of complete absorption and authority in his profession. "After you," he prompted Guy. "I want to drink a private toast to Anne. She's very beautiful, Guy." He added softly, with a smile, "As beautiful as a white bridge."

Guy stood looking at the opened pint bottle. The hubbub out the window seemed to poke fun at him now, at him and Anne. The bottle on the table was part of it, the jaded, half-humorous concomitant of the traditional wedding. He had drunk whisky at his wedding with Miriam. Guy hurled the bottle into the corner. Its solid crack and spatter ended the hooting horns, the voices, the silly tremolo of the organ only for a second, and they began to seep back again.

"Sorry, Bob. I'm very sorry."

Bob had not taken his eyes from him. "I don't blame you a bit," he smiled.

"But I blame myself!"

"Listen, old mana""

Guy could see that Bob did not know whether to laugh or be serious.

"Wait," Treacher said. "I'll get us some more."

The door opened just as Bob reached for it, and Peter Wriggs' thin figure slipped in. Guy introduced him to Treacher. Peter had come all the way up from New Orleans to be at his wedding. He wouldn't have come to his wedding with Miriam, Guy thought. Peter had hated Miriam. There was gray at Peter's temples now, though his lean face still grinned like a sixteen-year-old's. Guy returned his quick embrace, feeling that he moved automatically now, on rails as he had the Friday night.