VI

“Deirdre likes me,” I said by way of a delaying tactic when Justin did not speak. “Even if she doesn’t remember me, she knows I’m someone she can like.”

The dog responded with a loving lick at my cheek, but Justin still remained silent. After what seemed ages I stole a look at him and found that he had gone to sit upon the ledge of the chapel window, and that he was watching me in the same strange way that he had done last night after I had bandaged his arm.

“How does your arm feel this morning?” I asked him, politely. All this was unreal and had no meaning.

He shrugged the question aside as though the subject of his injury had no interest for him. “I was rude to you yesterday, Eve. I want to apologize.”

“That’s rather unlike you,” I said before I could bite my tongue. Why must I always be sharp with him? But I knew why. I wanted to hurt him before he hurt me. There had been too much of that before, yet here I was starting it all over again. Why couldn’t I just let myself be hurt—and never mind slapping back?

For once he did not take me up with equal sharpness. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why have you come?”

I knew what he meant, but I chose to misunderstand. “Dacia brought me here to show me the bluebells. I’d forgotten how beautiful they can be at this time of the year.”

I could sense exasperation rising in him, and I fed it, as I had always been able to do.

“If I’d known you were coming here, of course, I wouldn’t have stayed in the place. But I saw you driving off with Alicia and I thought you’d be gone for the day.”

He must be counting at least to fifty, I thought, and stole another look at him. The exasperation was there, but he was smiling, however wryly. When he answered he sounded reasonable enough, reminding me of how angry his very reasonableness could make me.

“Alicia wants to give Maggie a mare for her birthday,” he said. “I’m not sure Maggie will accept it, but Alicia wanted me to drive over to have a look at it. She brought me back right after, since there’s plenty to do around my workshop picking up the pieces from last night.”

I made a tremendous effort to do an about-face. I tried to let down that desperate guard of pride I held against him.

“I’m sorry about the delay to your work,” I said. “From what Nellie tells me, it’s something pretty important you’re onto. Is it really a new type of fuel?”

“That’s only part of it. Not that the fact of what I’m working on must be kept quiet. It’s the method that’s secret. The ingredients. Though whether they’ll come to anything or not I can’t tell. Especially not with all these beastly delays.”

“How long has this mischief been going on?” I asked.

“Several weeks. But never mind about that I hardly came here to cry on your shoulder. There’s just one thing I want to know—when will you be leaving?”

I stroked Deirdre’s proud neck and would not look at him. I was feeling stubborn again. “Maggie would like me to stay a little while.”

“What use will that be? I’m sorry Maggie wrote to you first about my plans. I should have been the one to open the subject. She had no business to ask you to come to Athmore.”

“She didn’t ask me,” I said. “I was supposed to see her in London. She lied for me yesterday.”

“Then why did you come?” he demanded bluntly.

I fumbled for an answer. “Aren’t there things we must discuss? The usual decisions to be made?”

“Such as whether you might get half of Athmore, I suppose?”

I pushed Deirdre away and stood up. I had to face him now. “I don’t want anything from you, and you know that very well. I have a job and I’m not helpless. If you want to know why I came, I’ll tell you. I wanted to know whether you really meant it.”

He looked at me with an astonishment that was obviously real. “If I really meant it? But what else could you think after the way you behaved? How could you possibly believe I’d ever want to set eyes on you again?”

“I behaved badly enough,” I agreed, “but not as badly as Marc made you think. Yet you seem to have forgiven him.”

“One may have to accept a brother. But some things are unforgivable in a wife. I haven’t much use for a woman who can’t be trusted.”

The old hopeless feeling of not being listened to, of not being understood, rose in me again. It was because of this futility that I had run away, hoping that somehow his feeling for me—if he missed me—might do what words could not.

“Yes,” I said, “it was unforgivable. It wouldn’t have happened if I had not let it. But I never thought you’d let me go. I went to London and waited. I thought you’d come after me.”

“I don’t play such games,” he said. “You always could behave like an obstinate child, and I’d had all of that I could stand.”

What could I say to him? That this was two years later and that I wanted to believe I might be more than two years older—that what I wanted more than anything else was another chance? Of course I could say none of this. I could not throw my pride away to that extent, or embarrass him by begging for a love he could not give.

I started toward the broken doorway and the path through the woods. “I’ll leave very soon,” I assured him. “Of course I shouldn’t have come.”

He did not speak until I reached the opening in the broken stone wall. Then his voice stopped me.

“I came here looking for you that day you left,” he said quietly.

I stopped where I was, not turning.

“Maggie told me you were going,” he went on. “She said you meant to walk about the grounds before you caught the bus, and I thought you might come here.”

“I did,” I said, and knew that the moment was somehow potent, that what was said now held my future on a balance scale.

Behind me Deirdre began to whimper, always sensitive to moods of the humans she loved. The tone of our voices worried her, and she began to run suddenly back and forth between us.

“Stop it,” Justin ordered. “Sit down and be quiet, Mac old girl.”

The dog obeyed him, sitting without question, but her whimpering went on, sounding almost like words, pleading, beseeching.

“You had gone by the time I got here,” Justin said.

Again I waited. If anything was to be offered, he must offer it. I had already said too much.

He left the window ledge and crossed the grassy area of the chapel. Up and down he strode, moving restlessly until he finally came to a halt before the tumbled stones of the wall beneath which Old Daniel had died.

“I blame myself for what happened here yesterday,” he said. “The wall should have been repaired without further delay. I was busy and let it be put off.”

I let my held breath go. His choice had been made. Nothing I might say mattered now. I might as well talk about Daniel.

“Do the police think it was really an accident?”

“Of course—what else?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I saw him yesterday just before he died and he tried to tell me something about the rook’s play in the topiary garden. I haven’t been able to think what he meant or why he should tell me so urgently.”

“Old Daniel’s been wandering in his mind lately,” Justin said. “He’s been hinting mysteriously and talking about old times in a maudlin way.”

“Perhaps he knew something,” I suggested. “Perhaps he knew something about what has been happening around Athmore lately, and—”

“Then he’d have told me.” Justin was curt. “Don’t let that wild imagination of yours get out of hand again, Eve.”

I ignored the pricking of his words. “How was Daniel dressed when the wall fell on him? Can you tell me that?”

“Dressed? Didn’t you see him when we brought him in last night? A jacket, corduroys.”

“What about his head? What would he be likely to wear on his head?”

Justin was growing impatient. “What are you getting at? If he had anything on his head, I suppose it fell off when the wall crashed.”

“We could search,” I said. “If it’s around here—”

Justin had endured enough of what he must regard as sheer whimsy. He looked down at me from his arrogant height. “Let’s not run on about Old Daniel. I didn’t come here to talk to you about him. I came to tell you that I don’t want you to stay on at Athmore. You’d better understand that Alicia is never going to be hurt by me again. Whatever happens, I shan’t let her—or myself—down. She is everything I want, and under the circumstances you can offer no opposition to my plans. I hope this can be managed as speedily and quietly as possible. There is no point in waiting any longer.”

He snapped his fingers at Deirdre, who bounded to his side, and then brushed past me through the broken doorway. The dog went with him, but only for a little way. Hard though the choice must have been, she left him after a few yards and came back to me. She pawed at my dress and barked, as though she scolded me—as though she believed that Justin and I belonged together and could not understand why we had spoken angrily and moved so far apart.

I went down on my knees beside her and held her tightly, past the time of tears, too frightened to cry. All the obstacles that had been set in my path were too large to be surmounted. Even the obstacle of my own sad-hurt-longing feelings were too much for me to overcome. There seemed no way to suppress or deal with them. If I had made a mistake about Alicia in that long-ago time, and if Justin had made a mistake about me, we ought to be able to say so. We ought to be able to admit our errors and go on from there. But “from there” was already gone in the past and it was too late.

Those were the words that hurt more than any others—“too late.” They rang in my ears all the way back to the house. Everything had worsened and the way out seemed darker than ever, and more lost to me.

Dacia waited for me on the terrace. “Did he find you?” she asked.

“You shouldn’t have sent him looking for me,” I told her.

She studied me shrewdly. “Put your foot in your mouth again, did you? You Americans are good at that. You’re always too touchy. When he asked me if I’d seen you, what could I tell him except where you were? I mentioned your yellow sweater, so if you moved about he could spot you through the woods. You know what he said? ‘She always liked to wear yellow.’ It wasn’t just the words. It was the way he spoke them—as if he remembered something he had a bit of a liking for.”

I could only shake my head as I went up the terrace and into the house. Remembering wasn’t enough. It was only the present that counted—and the present was nothing. Nevertheless, I climbed the stairs to the top floor with Justin’s words running through my mind: “She always liked to wear yellow.” What a feeble straw for me to seize upon. But it was the only straw I had.

When I reached the long gallery I crossed its width to pause before the portrait of Mr. Dunscombe. He looked a gentle, sad young man—someone who had accepted his fate and taken himself out of the fight. In a way we had something in common, he and I. Both had married Athmores, and both had lost out in the end. His solution had been a desperate one. Mine was more dogged, more stubborn. I couldn’t give up yet. There had to be a way to cancel out those hateful words “too late.” Surely, as long as one drew breath it was never too late. Not even when Justin told me that Alicia was everything he wanted. Even when everything pointed to this truth, my stubborn heart refused to believe, refused to accept.

Perhaps it was time for me to go back and face what I had done to break up my marriage two years ago. Perhaps by reliving that dreadful time I could discover how to go on from here.

As I turned my back on the picture in the long gallery I had only to face right instead of left in order to reach the green-velvet room, where that last miserable scene with Justin had been enacted. I took the right turn. I walked through the entrance to the south wing and followed the corridor toward the tower room that was the opposite number from my own blue lady’s room.

The door of the green-velvet room was closed, but it opened readily at my touch. From wide-flung windows a breeze came to meet me. Nellie must have been airing out ghostly cigarette smoke.

How well I remembered the central focus of the room—that great dramatic bed with its ornate coronet of a canopy, from which green cut-velvet curtains flowed to each of the four corners, and thence to the floor. Within the cave of the canopy and curtains a green-and-yellow tapestry of similar figure filled the wall behind the bed. On the other walls, covering them entirely, were green-and-gold tapestries depicting scenes from a stag hunt, which made this, I had always thought, anything but a restful room. A neutral gray carpet covered the floor, undoubtedly added in modern times, and across it were flung small East Indian rugs of rose and blue-green. Even the chairs were upholstered in green cut-velvet, grown shabby over the years. I remembered too the chest of drawers—of handsome English design with its mirror and serpentine front.

For a few moments I was still, recalling the emotions of that rainy evening when I had last stood here in green gloom, with candles lighted in brass candlesticks on a corner stand, and the shaded lamp on a center table shedding a pool of light. Marc had lit the candles before he brought me here. Marc, bent on mischief, playing on my jealousy, as I allowed him to do—his one purpose, as I later realized, to be rid of my presence at Athmore and break up my marriage.

But I had been blindly unsuspecting then. Dramatizing my loneliness, believing myself neglected by Justin, I had not found Marc’s flattery altogether distasteful. If one brother did not value me enough, then it would serve him right if the other brother did—even though I cared for only one. I was too young to realize how foolish I was being, or how unlikely it was that so elementary a ploy would work with Justin. Or indeed where such a tactic could really lead.

The thing had begun, not here in this room, but when we were leaving the table after dinner to go to the drawing room for our evening coffee. Oh—it had been months before, really, with Marc hinting to me about Alicia, so that I had confronted Justin with my knowledge of her, and of the fact that he still saw her from time to time—in fact, that we all saw her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I’d wailed to him. “How could you let me meet her so innocently, never dreaming what you two had been to each other?” I had been wildly dramatic in my accusations, and Justin had been cool, scornful.

“Do you think I’ve lived no life of my own before I met you? There’s no reason why Alicia and I should cut one another when we live in the same community. I hope we may always remain friends. This has nothing to do with you.”

Perhaps if I had not been so headlong and violent in my accusations, he would have been kinder, more reassuring. But having alienated him, I could not bear the results of my own actions. I could not accept reality. I did not want to share Justin with the past, I must own him wholly—as no man is willing to be owned. I began to watch him jealously, to question too much, to imagine constantly. What I wanted from him was a love as overwhelming and single-minded as my own—and Justin was not one to be overwhelmed, or to overwhelm anyone else.

That last night at dinner I was edgy and suspicious. I knew Alicia had called him on the phone and that something was up. When we rose from the table and Justin announced curtly that he would not stay for coffee but was going out for an hour or two, Marc stepped behind me and put his hands openly upon my shoulders, looking past me at his brother.

“Don’t worry,” he said, laughing at Justin’s glowering look. “I’ll keep you entertained, Eve dear. Justin’s business is important. So you must wait for him patiently.”

Justin strode out of the room and Marc whispered in my ear, “Alicia’s called for help again, and Justin has gone to Grovesend. Let me ring her up in a little while and ask for him there. Then you’ll know for sure.”

“Why do you hate him so?” I had asked, shrinking from this open betrayal, yet terribly, humanly, tempted.

Marc only smiled at me. He could be as enigmatic as Justin when he chose.

The tempting won, as it always had with girls named Eve. Marc rang up Alicia’s house while I stood by, hoping somehow that he would be proved wrong, that I would be reassured as Justin would not stoop to reassure me. But when Justin came to the phone, Marc held the receiver out so I could hear his voice. Then he replaced it quietly.

“Of course Justin will guess it was you calling,” he said, mocking me, now that I could not undo the act.

I ran away from him, hating myself as much as I hated Marc. I went to the library, where Maggie was talking quietly with Nigel Barrow. I took a book and sat far away from them, though I did not read. All my senses were keyed to listening for the sound of tires on the driveway that would mean Justin had come home. I did not know what I would do when I saw him. Would I fling myself into his arms and weep—an action he would detest. Or would I fling accusations at him instead and be equally detestable? Growing up did not occur to me. I did little of that until it was too late.

By ten o’clock that night it had begun to rain and the evening seemed doubly dreary. But I did not want to go to the room I shared with Justin. I could not bear to get into that big empty bed and torture myself by picturing my husband wth Alicia Daven. When Marc came into the library looking for me, I still sat staring at unread pages.

He was gentle now, as though he pitied me, and coaxed as if to distract me. “This is a perfect night for our Athmore ghost,” he told me. “Wouldn’t you like to meet him?”

“Ghosts walk at midnight,” I said grumpily.

His face grew bright with mischief. “Not this one. He was husband to Cynthia, the most beautiful of Mrs. Langley’s daughters, and he knew he was being cuckolded. He was not much of a man, I’m afraid, since his way out was to hang himself from beneath the high canopy of the bed in the green-velvet room. Now and then over the years someone will see him looking out the windows of that room on a rainy night. Or servants will swear they’ve come upon him sleeping in the bed, and that he faded away as they watched. He’s a harmless enough ghost, concerned with his own troubles, which he seems doomed to go on enduring forever. Rainy nights like the one on which he died are always best for him.”

Marc took away my book and pulled me from my chair. Maggie watched us doubtfully as we left the library together, and Marc called to her to tell Justin, if he came, that we had gone to visit the Athmore ghost.

The room waited for us with rain whispering at the panes and the bed lost in canopied green darkness. A draft crept in from closed windows and the candle flames dipped, setting long shadows to bowing. Marc turned off the lamp, leaving only pale candlelight.

“Our ghost doesn’t care for too much illumination,” he said.

That night I had felt the mood of the room in my very flesh. I had sensed its aura of old despair, of futility, of black hopelessness, and these things became my own. Knowing what I must see, I stepped close to the bed and peered between flowing curtains. Was there a pale, lost face looking out at me? Did cavernous eyes burn from those greenish shadows? Suddenly I knew there was danger for me here. My happiness, my very life, was threatened and I must get away from all this somber green velvet as quickly as I could. If a misty face watched me, that was its message. Mr. Dunscombe would know that we were kin in despair.

But when I turned from the bed, Marc caught me in his arms and held me close as if to still my trembling. In the beginning I was scarcely aware of him, except as comforter to my distress. All my being was given to an inner listening, a sensing that was paramount. When I heard the sound of a distant door it was with an inner ear, as much as with an outer. When Marc began to make love to me, I fended him off almost absently. How could he think I would turn to him when it was Justin I so obviously loved? Not until his mouth forced itself upon my own, did I begin to struggle. I was to blame for this, but I wanted it not at all.

Then, quite suddenly, before I could break the grip of Marc’s arms about me, he raised his head and I saw his gaze move toward the door. His look told me exactly what I would see if I turned my head. But when I would have stepped free of Marc’s clasp, he whispered in my ear, his lips barely moving: “Here’s your chance, sweet. Here’s your chance to make Justin suffer too.”

He put his lips upon mine, and I stood angrily still for his kiss, hating it, but filled with a savage desire to hurt Justin as much as he was hurting me. If he could go to Alicia—! I let my arms creep about Marc’s neck.

Justin walked into the room—not raging, but utterly cold and arrogant. Not jealous, but disgusted. When Marc released me and I turned about with my mouth bruised, my eyes angry, Justin nodded toward the door.

“Get out,” he said to me.

I think even Marc was a little frightened, but I dared not stay to see what might happen. I ran all the way—through the dark reaches of the long gallery, down the stairs, slipping in my haste, through the library, empty now, and finally to Justin’s room. It had always been Justin’s room—never mine. I ran through it to the small adjoining dressing room where there was a chaise longue that I sometimes used for napping. This place, at least was my own, and I spent the night there, sleeping not at all.

Justin never came. Perhaps he went out of the house and back to Alicia, who was conveniently alone at Grovesend.

The next morning there seemed only one thing to do. I packed a suitcase and told Maggie I was leaving. It was sheer flight—a running away because I could not face Justin. No explanation could be given. How could I say, “I played up to your brother because I wanted to punish you for hurting me?”

Before I left I wandered about the grounds, dramatizing my tragedy before I had learned what pain could really be. I said a tearful farewell to Deirdre and Maggie and went to London, believing that Justin would come for me and somehow solve the problem I could not solve for myself.

Now, these years later, standing again in the green-velvet room, I faced all that had happened in its full appalling detail, and took upon my shoulders the blame I had never truly accepted before. By now I knew—through letters from Maggie—that Justin’s visit to Grovesend had been innocent enough. Alicia claimed concern about some business matters she had become involved in which were not turning out well, and she wanted Justin’s advice. He could hardly refuse her, whatever her motive might have been. It was Justin’s misfortune to have a wife with so little faith in herself and her husband.

I shivered now with the chill of self-blame, and went to close the windows upon bright daylight. Then I stepped before the serpentine bureau and looked wonderingly into its mirror. My face did not look so very different from three years ago when I had first come to Athmore. I still looked ridiculously young with that pointed chin, wide brown eyes and softly youthful hair. Yet there was a difference. About my eyes, about the set of my mouth, there was a difference. Gaiety was gone, and all the old eagerness that had won Justin to me. The eyes of the girl in the mirror seemed more watchful—they doubted me. I did not like what I saw, but I did not know how to change what was happening to me.

The glass of the mirror was slightly crazed and it seemed to impose itself mistily between real face and reflected one. How long had this glass reflected this room? I wondered. Once it had mirrored me in Marc’s arms and shown Justin behind me. Beyond my own figure I studied the reflected room. I could see the canopied bed and I knew the glass must have beheld other, more dreadful acts which had occurred in this room. Yet the mirror continued to give back only innocent pictures of the present, unmarked by all it had seen in the past. The human face was not like that. It changed and carried in itself the tarnish of all that was experienced.

Since I had closed the windows, an odor had begun to make itself known in the room. I sniffed the air uneasily. There was no mistaking the smell of cigarette smoke. Not old, dead smoke that might cling to bed and window hangings, but a fresh, distinct odor that floated gently about the room, as if someone unseen stood near me smoking. For an instant fear touched me, but I flung it off and looked about for the source of the smell. The counterpart of my own tower entrance in the blue room bulged into this room as well. Beyond, I would find stone steps circling to the roof. Could someone be on the stairway smoking?

But the smell did not seem to come from that direction. Across from me was another doorway which had no duplicate in my own room in the opposite wing. I went to it quickly and turned the knob. The cigarette odor grew strong and I saw that I had opened the door of a small dressing room. Draperies were drawn across the single window and the room was so dim that I stood blinking for a moment, trying to accustom my eyes to the gloom.

“So you finally found me?” Marc said, and reached out a hand to switch on a table lamp. “I heard you come in some minutes ago.”

The room sprang to view, and I saw that he lay upon a chaise longue, lazily smoking and watching me.

“What are you doing, Eve—reliving history?” he asked.

My first impulse was to flight. I had a dreadful feeling that history might indeed repeat itself and that Justin could walk in upon us at any moment. But this was no time for repeated cowardice. Sooner or later Marc had to be confronted.

“So you are Nellie’s ghost?” I said, and went to the window where I flung back the draperies and let in air and daylight. From the window I could look out upon the side lawns of Athmore, with woods rimming the far side. Maggie was down there, walking in her garden. “Perhaps I can ask you the same question you’ve asked me,” I went on. “What are you doing here? Besides frightening Nellie, that is?”

Marc stood up and ground out his cigarette in an ashtray. Then he sauntered to the window and stood beside me, too close for comfort. I could never again be near Marc without uneasiness rising.

“Perhaps I’m watching for Nellie’s ghost,” he said. “Isn’t that as good a reason as any? But I’m more interested in how it happens you haven’t left early this morning, as you planned. Dacia reports that you’re staying on, in spite of Justin telling you straight off that he doesn’t want you here.”

“There are things to be said and things to be done before I go,” I told him, moving away from the window, away from him. “There’s a lot I want to know. I never learned what happened in the room next door, for example—after I left that night. How did you save yourself? What lies did you tell Justin about me?”

Marc’s smile was as sweet as I remembered, and as dangerous. “It took a little doing, I must say, but I managed. After all, is any man ever as much to blame as the woman who flings herself at his head?”

“You told him that?”

“Not then. Not in so many words. I just let Maggie know how it was so she could stand up to Justin for me. He wouldn’t listen to me at first. I couldn’t talk to him until later.”

I had known about Maggie’s efforts to keep Marc from being sent from Athmore peremptorily. She had written me about that, seeming to believe that I might worry about her poor darling Marc.

“Do you really think yourself so innocent?” Marc asked, very close to me again.

I drew sharply back before he touched me, and he laughed in the old, mocking way I remembered so well.

“That caught you on the quick, didn’t it?”

“Stop being theatrical!” I cried. “Of course I blame myself. I was stupid not to see how you were feeding my jealousy in order to be rid of me. Though I never fully understood, until Maggie explained it to me yesterday, how you wanted Athmore one day for yourself, rather than have it wasted on Justin’s heirs.”

He laughed as though I delighted him. “Naturally that was part of my feeling toward you. Why wouldn’t it be? Fortunately, Alicia Daven doesn’t care for children. She’ll never give him an heir. So if I marry Dacia, who is mad for children, everything will eventually come to my side of the family. That’s probably the one reason she might marry me. Providing, of course, that Alicia first takes care of a few little debts that are hanging fire. You know, Eve, it’s an odd thing, but Dacia seems to have taken to you. I believe she really likes you.”

“I like her,” I said. “She’s much too good for you, but she’s tougher than I was. She can look out for herself.”

He nodded. “And for me, too, if she decides to make a go of it. But what’s all this Dacia reports about a picture you took of Old Daniel yesterday? The police think he must have been dead since afternoon, so you could have snapped him shortly before that wall fell over.”

I had not thought of the old man since I’d parted from Justin, but now I found myself wishing Dacia were less prone to gossiping about all she knew. I did not want to discuss anything with Marc, but at least I could ask him the question Justin had not answered.

“What would Daniel have been likely to wear on his head when he was there yesterday?”

Marc regarded me thoughtfully. “This morning when I went out early to look around, I found his cap. Why? What made you think of such a thing?”

I shrugged and let it go. There was something more important I must ask of Marc before I went away. Futile though it might be, I had to try.

“Now that it no longer matters to you, won’t you at least tell Justin the truth about what happened here that night?”

Unexpectedly Marc reached out to touch a lock of my hair where it fell against my cheek, and when I would have drawn back, he caught it tightly and I held my head still against the hurt of the pull.

“The truth, Eve? But did you ever know the truth? Did you ever stop to think how I might have felt about you?”

I reached up to release the strand of hair from his fingers and saw that his eyes were dancing in the old wicked way.

“What an innocent you were! Fresh from college and sure you knew all there was to know. Such a pretty young thing—a lamb, really, with all that eagerness to experience, and all that trusting belief! And your notions about making over the world. Of course here at Athmore the world was a bit out of your reach, but you could work on us. And God knows you tried. Justin couldn’t take it, but if you had been my girl I’d have given you something to sink your teeth into. I’d have taken you away from this mausoleum and given you London to work on—and me!”

I walked away from him into the other room. He meant to start trouble all over again, and this time I had no intention of listening.

He followed me at once. “I used to wonder what you’d be like when you grew up. There’s a touch of the lemon now that was missing before. It’s an improvement, I’d say. I like a hint of sour with the sweet.”

He crossed the room so that he stood between me and the corridor door. The feeling that I’d had yesterday in Maggie’s sitting room came surging back—an almost frightening distrust of Marc North.

“Do you remember the way you kissed me, here in this very room?” He was mocking me again.

“You’d better remember Dacia now,” I snapped.

His laughter carried assurance. “Dacia knows well enough what I’m like. While I may struggle to change her speech, I don’t try to change her. We leave each other free.”

I had to pass him to make my escape through the door, and I moved toward him slowly, ready for whatever he might do. When he reached toward me, I stepped back quickly.

“Let me by,” I said.

Instead he pinioned my arms to my sides, laughing down at me, his face close to mine. Behind us a door opened—and was held ajar, as if someone behind me stood in waiting silence. I broke Marc’s clasp and sprang away from him. If it was Justin again—! But it was not. Nigel Barrow came through the tower door carrying an empty wine bottle, and a handful of twisted cigarette packets. We must have surprised him, but except for that moment of hesitation, he hardly blinked. He came into the room and held up the bottle for Marc to see.

“I had an idea there’d been somebody up on the roof. I’ve just had a look and collected these things. I suspect he’s been hiding out in the blue room, until Mrs. North moved in. Or perhaps he’s even been serving as the house ghost by smoking in this room. I think he’s not been down my tower stairs, and Dacia has seen no evidence. I’ve checked with her. It’s the empty rooms he’d pick, of course. But where is our intruder now? That is what we need to know.”

Marc was quickly alert, watchful. “If this is the answer to what’s been happening, then it ought to be easy to stop,” he told Nigel. “All we need do is post someone on the roof for a few nights. But I must say he’s a bold one. Give me that lot and I’ll speak to Justin about it right away.”

Nigel hesitated for a moment, almost as though he mistrusted Marc’s word. Then he turned bottle and packets over and Marc went off, with only a sidelong glance of mockery for me. I read it well. “Let’s see you get out of this!” his eyes were saying. I could not help my long sigh. Once more I was faced with the impossibility of explaining what could not be explained.

Nigel’s mustache twitched into a faint smile, but his gray eyes seemed chill and a bit disapproving.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. North,” he assured me stiffly, “I’ll not say anything about this.”

I made a gesture of impatience. “There’s nothing to be secretive about! I can only tell you that I detest Marc utterly.”

He considered this as though it might be a new idea. I supposed that Maggie must have given him Marc’s story of what had happened before I left Athmore that other time.

“At least that’s an understandable reaction,” he said. “I don’t always like Marc myself, though I’ve known him since we were boys. Come now, you mustn’t be upset and on the defensive. Let me take you downstairs to Maggie’s sitting room where you can pull yourself together. All this haunted velvet can give one the tremors.”

“I don’t want to talk to Maggie,” I said. “No one can talk to her about Marc.”

“Do you think she doesn’t know exactly what Marc is like?”

“Then how can she love him so much?”

He smiled ruefully. “Does love—whatever it may be—have very much to do with reason? Or haven’t you discovered that yet?”

“I’ve discovered it,” I said.

He held the door for me and I went through ahead of him. I would never be wholly comfortable with Nigel Barrow because I could never forget that time during my last month at Athmore when he had thoroughly embarrassed me. I thought of it uncomfortably as we walked along the corridor. He had come here from the Bahamas on an extended visit, though no one had seen him in England for years. He had gone to the islands as a young man and he’d made a sizable fortune there. But during his years away he had rather cut his ties with Athmore, as he had with England. Only Justin, returning from a trip to New York by way of Nassau had seen him a few times during that period, and then only at Maggie’s urging, since Justin felt that Nigel wanted to be left to go his own way alone. Not until long after his success was assured did he return to England. Then he had written Maggie, asking if he might come on a visit. Maggie had welcomed him warmly and forgiven his long absence, perhaps understanding Nigel’s innate pride and the need he had to make his own way without further dependence on Athmore and Justin.

“As a boy,” Maggie once told me, “all Nigel could give us was gratitude, and he was too young to suffer that without offering anything in return. Now everything is changed and he is his own man. But a lonely man, I think. I want to make him welcome.”

So Nigel had stayed for a visit, never seeming entirely content, yet yielding himself to Maggie’s fond efforts to make him feel that he had come home. He must have visited England several times in the years since I had left. That Maggie had finally accomplished her purpose now seemed evident.

As we went through the long gallery and down the stairs, I thought of these things, prodding my memory, reaching for more generous understanding than I had ever given him before.

On the occasion when he had upset me, I had somehow stubbed my toe on one of Athmore’s traditions, bringing down upon me Justin’s disapproval. Nigel had found me weeping angrily in a corner of the library and he had been kind, when I did not want his kindness.

“We’re alike in some ways,” he told me that day. “We’re both outsiders, aren’t we? But we mustn’t let that hurt us. You mustn’t mind being an American, any more than I mind the roots I came from. We make up for these things by what we become. We live them down.”

I had nearly exploded. “I like being an American!” I cried. “I don’t want to live it down. Athmore traditions are ridiculously stuffy and I won’t bow to notions that belong to the Middle Ages, or pretend that English ways are always better than American!”

He had been quite gentle and reasonable with me. “Give yourself time and you’ll come to love the house and all its traditions, stuffy or no. I understand how you feel. I had no traditions of my own when I came here, and I suppose I resented having other people’s thrust upon me. Perhaps that’s why I had to make good on my own. I couldn’t come back to Athmore until my perspective was better. Give yourself time, Eve, and you’ll be all right.”

I had not been willing to allow for time. I had been too young and rebellious, and I had not thanked him for counseling me. Now these several years later, I remembered and was uncomfortable all over again. It was Nigel, I realized, who had brought me back here this time, urging Maggie to write to me, even though I had not treated him very well in the past.

We found Maggie’s sitting room empty, and Nigel went to a small cabinet for a decanter and glasses.

“Sherry?” he asked. “You need a bit of something to relax you. I hope you’re not like Dacia, who feels the only thing to drink that’s with it, as she says, is vodka and lime—at whatever hour.”

I took the glass of sherry and sat in the same chair where I had faced Maggie yesterday.

There was no fire in the grate this morning, but the pot of pink azaleas still brightened the room, and Maggie’s shabby possessions seemed comfortable and familiar, so that I began to relax in spite of myself.

Nigel stepped to a window, giving me time to recover. He never moved suddenly, or restlessly, as Justin might. I think he had learned long ago that it was safer not to take the center of the stage. Fewer mistakes were noticed, if one did not call attention to oneself. A sensible course that never occurred to me in time.

I seized on the subject of Dacia in order to make conversation and show that I no longer resented him.

“What do you think of Dacia Keane?” I asked him. “What do you think of this swinging set she’s part of in London?”

He smiled. “I’ll admit they leave me behind. But I admire them, I think. They’re a bit uncertain about a number of things and they overdo the matter of being in, as they say. But most of these youngsters have jobs of one sort or another and they work harder than some of their elders do. Dacia and her sort are breaking down barriers faster than my generation ever did. She already knows pretty much where things fit in. On the other hand, I don’t think she’ll ever appreciate Athmore the way you and I can appreciate it.”

“Now you’re erasing barriers too,” I said.

He took no offense. “Yes. It’s an odd do, isn’t it? Me marrying Maggie Graham after all these years.”

This seemed treacherous ground, lest I say the wrong thing, and I was silent.

He read me well, as sensitive as ever, and when he spoke again his manner returned to the stiffly formal.

“I hope you’ll stay for a while, now that you’re here, Mrs. North,” he said.

I tried to smile at him. “You used to call me Eve. But aren’t you echoing Maggie now?”

He turned from the window to look at me with that quiet authority which always surprised me when it appeared. Though he never seemed like a man who might take command, I supposed he must have done so in the business field away from Athmore.

“I never echo anyone,” he said. “I think it would be good for Athmore if you stayed. It might even be good for Justin.”

“How can it possibly be good for Justin when he wants to marry Alicia Daven?” I cried, falling back with a thud into my own deep unhappiness and forgetting everything else.

“Drink your sherry,” he said, and came to sit opposite me on the sofa, turning his own glass by the stem, watching the pale amber liquid move from rim to rim.

When I had taken a sip or two he began to speak again, and I listened in surprise, thinking of how little I really knew Nigel Barrow.

“Once before you were offended when I allied myself with you,” he reminded me. “And I was wrong that time. I had forgotten how sensitively American an American can be. The English mind criticism of the English less, I think. And—perhaps unfortunately—we accept it less. Feeling more assured, perhaps. But we are still alike in some ways—you and I. You haven’t outgrown the need to have someone tell you constantly who you are. While I’ve never outgrown the need to tell the world constantly who I am. I think mine is the better way to prove myself. It may irritate, but it depends less on others.”

I smiled wryly at this unexpected picture of Nigel telling the world. “That’s hard to believe about you. I’ve never heard you brag. I’ve never heard you tell the world a thing.”

With no responsive smile, he set down his glass and held out both hands for me to see. This morning he wore a sleeveless blue sweater over his gray shirt, but at the cuffs of the shirt were the star-sapphire links I had seen him wear so often.

“What else is this?” he asked. “Star sapphires with a sweater? No Athmore man would be caught dead wearing such cuff links. I suppose it’s my way of saying, ‘What do I care for your traditions?’ I never dared say it as a boy because I was too much in awe. But I can say it now. Perhaps that’s the very reason I can better respect its traditions now and feel quite comfortable about marrying Maggie.”

He spoke with quiet assurance, and I knew he meant every word. But he had learned this assurance through years of proving himself—which was something I had never been able to do.

“It takes a certain amount of persistent obstinacy to stand up to Athmore,” he went on, and added with a slight smile, “You have that at least. Behind this house and the people who live in it, behind the portraits on the walls and the very stones of those old ruins in the woods, are hundreds of years of tradition and more or less responsible behavior. All of which provides a certain built-in superiority which those who are born to it take for granted. Yet what can Athmore do in the face of my cuff links but shudder? And shuddering I have never minded. You see, my dear, I have found out who I am. I need no one to tell me. I can live here now as Maggie’s husband without having Athmore destroy me. Can you, as Justin’s wife?”

I sipped the last of the sherry and set the glass aside. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I only know that I am his wife—still.”

“And you want to go on being, don’t you?”

“Yes—yes, I do! I haven’t any pride about that any more. But Justin keeps telling me that he doesn’t want me here. So what am I to do?”

Nigel answered me dryly. “You have the usual two choices. You can stay or you can go. If you go—what then?”

“I don’t know. How do other people live when they lose everything they care about?”

He regarded me seriously, not smiling now. “You’re very young. There will be other men. It’s ridiculous to think there won’t be. And love always changes. Even with the same two people it can take different forms. I suppose it never stands still, and for that reason it’s safer not to count on it.”

I had never expected to pour myself out to Nigel Barrow. Somehow he had opened the floodgates that had been closed for a long time, and there was a certain relief in talking like this to someone. His manner, which took me seriously, his uncritical objectivity, made talking to him possible.

But now he had obviously had enough of playing confidant. He stood up and moved toward the door.

“Stay for a while at Athmore,” he said. “If you stay, a way may open.”

I held out my hand to him. “Thank you, Nigel. Perhaps I owe you that—since it was your suggestion to Maggie that brought me here.”

He took my hand briefly, then let it go. He still had not called me Eve. I found myself thinking of Dacia’s words—that Maggie would marry Nigel in order to save Marc and Justin and Athmore. If that was true and he really cared for her, then I ought to feel a little sorry for him. Somehow I did not. I had the feeling that Nigel would never do anything blindly. If Maggie married him he would be aware of her terms or he would not take the step. I found myself liking him better than I ever had before—perhaps because I knew him a little better.

When he had gone I left my chair and went to one of the rear windows of the room, where I could look out over the topiary garden. No matter what Maggie or Nigel urged upon me, how could I stay when Justin did not want me? There were limits to foolish hope, limits even to my ability to snatch at straws. Perhaps the only sensible thing to do was pack at once and get myself aboard the next bus to London.

But I did not move. I stayed where I was, staring out the window. When had I ever been sensible when it came to Justin?