After lunch Violet rested for an hour, glad to be alone in the bedroom, not closing the shutters so that she felt bathed in sunlight and in silence, half-awake with the sense of layers and layers of summers, generations of summers coming alive just by the fact of one person being here, one person holding the so slight, so perilous thread of the past in her consciousness. But after me, Violet thought, after Annie and Cammaert—what then? And because it was a dying splendor they could still keep alive for a few years, it seemed even more vivid and dear, requiring more of them than of other Denes who had taken for granted, perhaps, what they would consciously hold and sustain against the uncertain changeable future. Violet felt deeply excited.

After tea, at Annie’s suggestion, Charles drove her down to the village to see Mrs. O’Connell and the clerk at the post office and the grocer, but everyone they met spoke to them and welcomed them.

“I feel like the Prince Consort,” Charles said on the way back. “But won’t the Vicar be offended?” he teased. “We forgot to call on him.”

“I expect he will.” Violet was dismayed. “Oh dear…”

Charles had meant it as a joke and told her not to take herself too seriously, but Violet only felt and was absorbed in the intense pleasure of coming back to the house for the first time.

Charles did not want to dress for dinner, but to Violet this was a matter of crucial importance. It was the final piece of the pattern which she had been creating all day. When she came down the great staircase in her smoky grey velvet dress, a rose pinned at the throat (she had bought this dress in London and kept it on purpose to wear this first evening) and found Charles, all black and white, standing in front of the fire in the library, she felt like a captain bringing his ship in to a perilous landing.

“Wherever did you get that dress, darling? You look absolutely marvelous…”

“And the house, Charles,” Violet said quickly, looking at the firelight reflected in the glass doors of the bookcase across the room, and out through the long windows at the intensely green twilight through the leaves, at the rather quaint fat bunch of pink roses on the table facing the fire, the brown velvet sofa standing back to it, and then finally at the portrait of her father in the corner to the left, “Doesn’t the house look different too at night?”

“Hadn’t noticed,” Charles said, for he was looking at her, “but now that you mention it, yes, the house has an air about it at night—I see what you mean about dressing for dinner. It sort of asks for it, doesn’t it?”

“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” It was the question Violet had held back all day, feeling that it would be tempting fate to ask it, at least until the circle of this first day was closed and they were safe.

“Rather—” Charles was very busy about something at the little table where the drinks and glasses were kept. Now there was a loud pop followed by Violet’s astonished cry.

“Champagne! Really, darling, can we afford it?”

“Of course we can’t afford it. Here,” and he held out to her one of the Venetian champagne glasses her grandfather had brought back from his Grand Tour. “It’s not really cold enough, I’m afraid…”

“Oh Charles, do you remember, we had champagne for our engagement?”

“Of course I remember. You aren’t the only one who has a past bound up in this house. On that occasion your father said, ‘Bring her back someday, Charles.’”