Robin Greig, a nurse in her mid-twenties, lives with her asthmatic older sister, Joanne, in a small Ontario town. On a summer evening, she frets about whether her green dress will be ready for her upcoming trip to Stratford. She claims that she’ll “die if they don’t have that dress ready” (236), provoking Joanne’s quiet scorn. For five years, Robin’s solitary excursions to Stratford to attend a Shakespeare play have given her “an assurance that [her] life […], which seemed so makeshift and unsatisfactory, [is] only temporary” (239). She savors the performances, her solitary walks by the river, and the train ride home. These experiences turn her otherwise confined life into something interesting and unique.

The previous summer, she had seen Antony and Cleopatra. After the play, she discovered that she had lost her purse in the theater’s restroom. With no money or train ticket, she wandered in distress until a large Doberman brushed against her. Its owner, a man with a foreign accent, reassured her. She told him about her lost purse, and he offered to lend her money. Then, he invited her to his home for food before she took her train. His name, he later said, was Danilo Adzic, though he went by Daniel. He was from Montenegro and repaired clocks in a small shop on Downie Street.

Robin accompanied him without hesitation. His home was sparse but orderly, filled with clocks downstairs and a bachelor’s neatness upstairs. He served her stroganoff with wine, and they spoke about Shakespeare, Montenegro, and her nursing. They then walked by the river. At the railway station, he bought her ticket; when she offered to repay him, he instead asked her to repay him by returning to the city the following year to watch another play and meet him in the same place. Most importantly, he asked her to wear “the same dress” (251). Then, they kissed on the platform. He told her not to write letters, only to return the following summer.

Back home, Robin concealed the encounter from Joanne, who suspected little beyond teasing that her sister came home “smelling of drink and goulash” (253). Secretly, Robin immersed herself in books on Montenegro, maps, and histories, trying to “settle Danilo into some real place and a real past” (254). Throughout the winter, she cherished the memory of him, feeling chosen, transformed, and set apart. She felt that it was “important” that they had met. She imagined him involved in mysteries and dangers, as she relished her private fate.

When summer returned, Robin resolved to see him again. She planned her trip for the anniversary date, bought a ticket for As You Like It, and had her green avocado dress sent to the cleaners. At this point, the narrative returns to the point at the beginning of the story as Robin frets about the availability of her dress. When illness delays its pressing, she buys a new lime-green dress instead. On the train, she rides with an acquaintance and her grandchildren, endures chatter, and feels her nerves rise. At the theater, she can’t remain through the performance; shivering with anxiety, she leaves during the play and makes her way to Downie Street.

Robin returns to the shop, finding the door open. Inside, Daniel is bent over, “engrossed in the work he was doing on a clock” (258). She calls to him, but he looks up only reluctantly. Slowly, he approaches, seeming “perturbed,” and shakes his head. Then, without speaking, he pushes “the shop door […] shut in her face” (259). The rejection devastates Robin. She feels “shame, terrible shame” (260) and wonders whether Daniel has a wife upstairs or perhaps his promises were never serious. She wonders whether his coldness was due to believing that rejection was “better cruel than kind” (260). She walks away weeping, returning home with a story about a bug in her eye to explain her tears to Joanne. She blames the dress and vows never again to wear the green dresses or go to Stratford.

The narrative jumps forward many years. Robin, now an older woman, works part-time in the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. Joanne has been dead for 18 years. Her husband, Willard Greig, lives nearby but has ailments. Robin has never married. The town has changed: It has a larger population and looser social codes. Robin has found friends among different sorts of people. She lives independently and is active in a local theater society.

One winter, she arrives for her work on the ward and is told that three overflow patients have been placed there temporarily. She looks at the three cots and is startled to recognize one of the men. His face, though aged, is “still a face broad at the temples, retaining some look of authority and—as when she last saw it—of perturbation” (264). His card identifies him as Alexander Adzic. Startled, Robin asks for information. His documentation reveals that he is Alexander Adzic. Apparently deaf-mute since birth, he trained to repair clocks while his brother, Danilo, took care of him. Looking at the dates of birth for the two brothers, Robin realizes that Alexander and Danilo are twin brothers.

The revelation floods her with memories. She recalls how in Shakespeare, twins often led to mistakes and disasters, though usually reconciled in comedy. On that day long ago, she realizes, she met Alexander, alone in the shop while Danilo was briefly absent. She mistook him for Danilo, while he didn’t recognize her at all or know how to deal with her in any other way. In that instant, confusion altered her fate, ruining everything “in a couple of minutes” (268).

Robin reflects that what happened was not gradual disillusion, as in most romances, but a sudden catastrophe. However, even now, she still yearns. She refuses “to spare a moment’s gratitude for the trick that has been played” (268). She thinks again of the green dress, of the wrong one she wore, of chance and fate: She thinks that, if she failed in any way, “it would be in the matter of the green dress” (269).