“Psyche,” he said aloud. “Psyche.”
It was morning, and the sun was shining, and Psyche was again alone in the empty restaurant when he walked in. To Steve, it was as if the present time had stood still in order to allow the years to catch up with it. To be precise, seventeen years. He felt that he had known her, not briefly, but always.
He walked directly to the counter behind which she stood, and, without speaking, laid his hands palms upward on it.
For a moment Psyche did not move. Then, slowly, but without any hesitation, she placed her own hands in his.
“Would you trust me again?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, Steve.”
“Then go and get your purse, or whatever you think you might need for the balance of the day. Change your dress, if you like, but you don’t need to. You look perfect just as you are. I’m taking you to see some people who are rather interested in you. I’ll tell you about them after we are on our way.”
“But Ollie——” Psyche began uncertainly.
“I called Ollie earlier this morning.”
This can only mean one thing. Psyche thought. He is taking me to see friends of his, perhaps even his family. And desperation, which had been steadily building up during two days in which she had begun to wonder if she would ever see him again, dissolved before overwhelming happiness. Happiness marred only by the desolate thought that no reciprocal gesture would ever be possible, that nowhere had she anyone of her own to whom she could introduce him.
“These—these people,” she said. “Do they know we’re coming?”
“Yes,” he told her. “They know we’re coming.”
11 EPILOGUE
THE chimes of the front door-bell sounded in the well of the circular staircase, musical but clear, their echoes fading softly against the thick, warm silence of the house.
A maid stepped through an archway under the stairs, to wait for a repetition of a sound she was not quite sure she had heard. And, as she stood there, a shaft of late afternoon sunlight, falling athwart the chandelier above her head, scattered a shower of prismatic colours over her black-and-white uniform, transforming it momentarily into motley out of place in time and locale.
Again the bell rang, still musical, but this time unmistakable in the prearranged pattern of a summons she had been told to expect.
Moving quietly away from beneath the soundless fall of colour, she crossed the hall diagonally and traversed a long living-room to French windows and a garden that dropped in terraced levels to a bed of delphiniums as blue in their fall flowering as the blue sky above.
Sharon, her hand in Dwight’s, walking close to the delphiniums, saw the girl immediately, and walked swiftly to meet her.
“Is she here?” she asked, as soon as she was within earshot, and her husky voice broke a little on the simple words.
“Yes, ma’am, she’s here. I did as you said. I didn’t answer the door.”
With a smile more brilliant than her wheat-gold hair, Sharon thanked the girl, dismissed her, and turned to Dwight who was now at her side.
“Dwight—darling” she whispered, while she thought,
“He was right, the waiting has been easier here than it would have been inside. And now—I must not, must not run——”
Then she was running as she had never run before.
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