"I would have advised you to do so, had I been in a position for it," Henry says, dryly, "my brother having a near-encyclopedic memory for slights, and for faces."

He sighs softly, stares off into the distance. Beyond the cemetery and the snow, seen as if through the wrong end of a telescope, there seems to be a vision of Oxford, of two young men in a punt on a warm summer afternoon. He murmurs, half to himself, a fragment of Keats:

"Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

And then, a small grimace. "My mind must be strange indeed now, if it wanders to the Romantics."