"Why not Green Town, Illinois?" he said. "Here. We haven't really visited your own town togheter at all".
     She settled back, as did he, and she said: "I'll tell you how it was, then, when I was only nineteen, in this town, a long time ago..."
     It was a night in winter and she was skating lightly over a pond of white moon ice, her image gliding and whispering under her. It was a night in summer in this town of fire in the air, in the cheeks, in the heart, your eyes full of the glowing and shutting-off colour of the fireflies. It was a rustling night in October and there she stood, pulling taffy from a hook in the kitchen, singing, and there she was, running on the moss by the river, and swimming in the granite pit beyond town on a spring night, in the soft deep warm waters, and now it was the fourth of July with rockets slamming the sky and every porch full of now red-fire, now white-fire faces, hers dazzling bright among them as the last rocket died.
     "Can you see all these things?" asked Helen Loomis. "Can you see me doing them and being with them?"
     "Yes," said William Forrester, eyes closed. "I can see you"
     "And then..." she said, "and then..."
     Her voice moved on and on as the afternoon grew late and the twilight deepened quickly, but her voice moved in the garden and anyone passing on the road, at a far distance, could have heard its moth sound, faintly, faintly...