I knew that the man had come on an errand, but exactly what it was, or for whom he was acting, I was unsure. I found him beside the well with the expression of a person who has arrived in despite of himself. For a long while, ignoring the foul weather overhead, he stood at the well, debating, and for a long while I watched him standing there, as if the two of us had somehow become united by a common purpose.

At last, feeling my eyes upon him, he turned; I seemed to hear the words - "To connect is only a different kind of delusion. There are things that connect, and there are other things that will never connect."

"You are meditating on the latter, I suppose," I said.

"That would be impossible. I am meditating, rather, on the things that might form the latter, could the latter ever be formed out of anything. I say, in advance, that it cannot."

"You are standing by a well," I observed.

"Yes," he said, as if suddenly realising something. "A man by a well. Well, that is two things already."

"And you cannot connect them? Or you are unwilling to do so?"

"That would be dangerous."

"And a third thing - a man who is speaking to you."

"Maybe it is only I who imagine that I am being spoken to?" he said provocatively, as if he set little store by my presence.

I did not care to pursue such solipsism. Ignoring the comment, I said on impulse - "I wonder if there's something in the well."

"There can't be. The quality of a well is to be empty."

"I thought it was the quality of a well to hold water."

"That is the quality of an argument, not a well."

"And that is the quality of rhetoric, rather than wells or arguments."

"As I said, it is dangerous to connect."

"Nevertheless, I will look all the same."

"You would act futilely?" he said, surprised. "I had not anticipated that."

"Curiosity does not have to be rational."

"I had reckoned without that," he repeated. "In such cases, it is only the rational that one seeks to guard oneself against."

I was arrested by that word "guard", without knowing why.

"Do you intend to prevent me?" I asked, carefully. Something about him frightened me. It was as if he gave me the answers I expected; or else it was as if I myself guessed what he was going to say. One or other of us seemed to know the other too well, and I was not sure if he was succumbing to my will, or I to his.

"Prevent you? With words, yes, very much so."

"And only with words?"

"If I prevented you in any other way, that would only form a connection of yet another kind."

I looked in the well. There was nothing but the drowned face, mouth wide like a hole, with its spilt hair and limbs half sunk in the mud.

"You are right," I said. "I was half expecting to find a body down there."

"But instead you find nothing, because it is the nature of a well to be empty. It would, though, be the perfect place to lose such a thing, since its emptiness would conceal it completely." Apparently contradicting himself, he added "You would have to come back, though, against yourself, to check it was still there."

"Who's to say such a thing might not happen by accident? Anyone might stumble into a well, late at night, and there would be no one to blame for that," I said quickly. I already knew more about this man than I cared to know, and half of me wanted simply to escape with the suspicions I already had.

"I suppose it could happen," he was saying carelessly, in turn. "But I would rather imagine a ruthless farmer, who smokes his pipe before the fire, and makes a farm-hand attend to his tools."

"What does that have to do with the well?"

"Nothing. Neither this, nor any other well. The farm might be far away, and so that boy's persecution has gone long unknown. Long, and forever will be."

"So he was persecuted, was he?"

"Oh yes."

"And one night, when the farmer was asleep ...?"

"That farmer would have damned himself before he even hit the bottom. You could never hurt him by anything you did to him directly," he said with odd emphasis. "One might say there was almost no come uppance to be had upon him."

"So there is no connection?"

"None whatsoever. No connection between the farmer and the farm-hand he so ill used. No connection between the farmer and his beloved daughter. No connection between the farmer and the well. No more connection than there is between the two of us, two strangers who meet by chance, although - in truth - your hands are coarse as mine, and your eyes tell me the world has not treated you fairly, either."

"Tell me about the daughter," I asked, refusing to acknowledge whatever implication he was trying to make, resisting the intimacy he seemed to want me to share with him.

"She was always under the weather," he said resolutely, as though he would not discuss anything further. "She was ... always under the weather."

Then he turned and walked away, leaving me standing there. But it was a trick of the light. It was I that had turned and walked away; it was he that was standing there. Somewhere, the heart of a mystery was still beating, but I closed my eyes, willing myself not to find it.