During their journey into Wales he had sometimes been made irritable by her fussing-though that was an unkind word to use. By her everlasting patience and consideration for his well-being, then. Kinder than usual. It had not escaped her notice, then.

"I shall leave for a while," she said. "You will be able to rest better if I am not here."

But he set his arm about her and held her against him. "Don't leave," he whispered. He was afraid that if she left she would never come back, that he would never see her again. It was an unbearable thought. And dizzying in light of the fact that he had just got engaged-to Allison. ' 'Kiss me."

He knew that the joy that lighted her face had always been there when she was a child and a girl. Beautiful, joyous Adèle. He knew, too, that it had not been there a great deal in recent years-only the soft, gentle look of love.

"Kiss me, my love," he whispered again. "Don't leave me. Don't ever leave me."

Her lips were soft, gentle, slightly pouted-quite different from Allison's wide, sensuous mouth. Adèle kissed as a child kissed, but with the added dimension of womanhood. She kept her lips sealed to his. He parted his lips and licked at hers. So warm and so sweet. He prodded his tongue through the seam to the softer, moister flesh within. She moaned.

He was too tired to become fully aroused. Which was just as well, some sane but distant part of his mind thought. He was kissing someone else's wife. He was kissing someone who was not Allison. But she was his wife. She was his love. The only, eternal love of his heart. He was not normally given to such poetic flights of fancy.

"Oh," she said when he drew back his head a few inches. "Oh, John." Her eyes looked rather dazed.

He did not feel ill, he thought. Just very weak and very tired. He needed food and air and exercise. Lots of all three. He was not going to die. People of the 1990s did not die of tuberculosis-not in First World countries, anyway. He had been vaccinated against it as a child, just like everyone else in his class, when a schoolfriend had developed the disease. But he was not in the twentieth century at the moment. Somehow he had been transported back into the early nineteenth. Something told him, though, that he had brought part of his old self with him, as well as his mind. He had brought his resistance to the disease that had been killing John Chandler, Viscount Cordell. He knew the name of the man in whose body and mind he found himself.

"I need food and air and exercise," he told Adèle. "What is for dinner? Do you know?"

"John?" she said. "Are you sure? You know how- how upset you become when you cannot do what you try to do. Perhaps if you rest for a few weeks your strength will come back. I am going to see that it does."

Yes, it had been a trial to him, his weakness. He had never resigned himself to his fate. He had always been a man of high energy, someone who wanted to accomplish a great deal in this world, someone who could never sit still and let the world go by him. He had raged against his illness. It seemed hard to believe now that he had been such a high-powered man. Why waste life on busy living? Allison would approve of him as he had been, he thought, and felt the dizziness again for a moment.

"And when my strength does come back," he said, "we will live here forever, Adèle, and never return to the hurry of modern life. We will raise our children here where it is quiet and beautiful, where we can be close to nature and to God."

She hid her face against him. He knew she was crying. His words must seem cruel to her. "Forever" to Adèle was probably only a few weeks, at the most. She knew there would never be children.

But he thought of something suddenly as he held her close to him. He remembered now. There had been an eccentric Viscount Cordell of the Regency era who had come to Cartref with his bride for their wedding trip and had never returned to England. They had lived here until a ripe old age, the two of them, with their children. He could not remember the exact date of their deaths and he could not remember how many children they had had. But he could remember one other thing clearly-two things.

That viscount had been John. His wife had been Adèle.

John Chandler, Viscount Cordell, certainly had not died of consumption within weeks or even months of his wedding.


******************

It seemed to her that she had loved him all her life. When he had lifted her down from that stile, he had lifted her into his life. He had always included her, guarded her, listened to her, and talked to her after that, though a mere four-year-old girl had seemed nothing but a nuisance to her brothers and sisters and to his and to the other children with whom they had played. He had seemed so grown-up, so tall, so handsome, so-oh, so wonderful to her infant's eyes. And he had remained so ever since.

She had loved him with a woman's love for years and years. She had resisted all of her parents' attempts to find a suitable husband for their youngest child. If she could not have John, she would have no one. She had decided that when she was sixteen, perhaps earlier. If he had not cared for her, perhaps she would have forced herself to turn her eyes, if not her heart, elsewhere. But she had always known that he loved her. There was a special gentleness, a special tenderness in his treatment of her.

Not that he would have married her. She was a dreamer with a streak of realism. He was an older son, heir to a viscount's title and fortune. More important than that, she knew that he did not love her as she loved him. He loved her, but she was not that one love of a lifetime, of an eternity, as he was to her. He loved her, perhaps, as he would a beloved sister. Maybe a little more than that. He had kissed her on her seventeenth birthday…

And then he had become ill. No one, at first, had been willing to admit what it was that was striking him down, robbing him of flesh and color and vitality. But she had known from the start. She had watched her handsome, strong, vital, beloved John begin to die. And something in her had started to die too.

All her dreams became focused on one single impossible goal. She wanted to be the one to nurse him out of this life, the one to love him over into the kingdom of love so that there would be no darkness for him between the two moments. The dream had seemed even more impossible when he had left for Italy in the hope of some miracle cure. She had expected never to see him again.

But he had come home. She had gone with her mama and papa to call on him. She preferred not to think about her first sight of him. Death hovered over him, very close. But her dream had lurched painfully into focus again.

She had found a way to be alone with him for a few minutes just two days later and she had asked him to marry her. He had protested, of course. For the first time he had spoken the truth to her.

"I am dying, Adèle," he had said gently. "I do not have long left. I have nothing to give you, dear."

Somehow-she was not normally a bold woman-she had persuaded him that indeed he did. That he had the power to enable her to be with him all the time, making him more comfortable.

"I cannot stay close to you if I am not married to you, John," she had said. She had taken both his thin hands in hers and had kissed them repeatedly. She had not known quite where her boldness had come from. "I can think of no greater happiness than being close to you."

And so he had married her just one week later. He had decided on some impulse to bring her here, to his home in Wales, for their wedding trip. Everyone had thought him mad. It was such a long distance over roads that were notoriously rough. But she had not tried to argue with him. She had known it was a dying man's wish-to die in the place he considered the loveliest in the world. In the place that had the loveliest name she knew-Cartref. Home.

She had come here with a strange hope in her heart. It was the hope for a miracle. It was strange because she had never had hope, not since the moment she had realized he had consumption. Even when he went to Italy, she had had no hope. When he had come home and when she had begged him to marry her, there had been no hope beyond the dream to be his wife and to have the privilege of comforting his last days.

But throughout the journey, hope had built, even as his body became weaker with exhaustion and as the coughing spells became longer and more frightening. By the time they reached Cartref that new and strange inner part of herself knew that he was going to recover, even while the rational, practical part of her was certain that it was impossible. She must not buoy herself up with false hope, she had told herself repeatedly.

Besides-the thought had saddened her-if he recovered, he would find himself trapped in a marriage that was not entirely of his own choosing.

During the three days following their arrival in Wales, then, she watched the changes in him with a bewildering mixture of hope and cold reason. He was rallying after the exhaustion of the journey. He was rallying from the pleasure of being in a place he loved. And from the knowledge that no further great effort would ever be required of him. They had both known, though it had never been spoken between them, that he had come here to die, that he would never have to make the return journey to England.

It was not unusual, she knew, for patients to rally and even seem to recover from serious illnesses for a short while. That was what was happening to John. She tried to believe that and to be grateful that she was to have a little more of him than she had ever expected, especially during that dreadful journey. She had even doubted once or twice-or the part of her that had not been borne up by that strange hope had doubted-that he would get as far as Cartref.

On the first day he dressed for dinner-his valet had looked at him in amazement and then at her in inquiry when he demanded it-and came down to the dining room with her. He even ate. Not a great deal, it was true, but then since their wedding it had seemed to her that he existed on air. He had eaten no solid food.

"I have to eat," he told her with a smile, tackling the fish course. "I just looked at myself in the looking glass, Adèle, and I am nothing but skin and bones. I do not know how you can bear to look at me."

She would have wept except that there was a twinkle in his eye. "You are John," she said. "I could look at you every moment for the rest of my life and not grow tired of doing so."

He chuckled-and her heart turned over with joy at the sound. "And I am so weak," he said, "that I fear I made a dent in both the banister and your shoulder coming downstairs."

They had taken the stairs one at a time, with a long pause on each one. The butler had watched anxiously and incredulously from the foot-John's valet had carried him upstairs on their arrival.

On the second day he insisted on taking each meal in the dining room, even breakfast. And he forced himself to eat. She could tell that it was an effort and part of her wondered if it was worth torturing himself when… But there was the other part of her that hoped and did more than just hope. There was a part of her that knew.

He would not go back to bed except for one hour in the afternoon-he had her promise to wake him after an hour, provided she was awake to do it. He insisted that she lie down with him, and he held her hand, twisting her sapphire ring, until he drifted off to sleep.

For the rest of the day he walked. It was incredible to see. He would not sit down to conserve his energy. And he would not allow her to close the downstairs windows after he had thrown them all open, even though the air coming off the ocean was brisk. He walked all about the house, slowly and doggedly, her arm drawn through his, though he assured her that she must not feel obligated to trudge her slippers to shreds on his account.

"I would trudge my slippers and my boots and the soles of my feet to shreds to be with you," she told him, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder. "But do not exhaust yourself, John. And do not catch a chill."

"Sea air and exercise are good for a person," he said. "Once I am stronger, I am going to be marching along the beach and running up and down the hills to build an appetite for breakfast."

She laughed against his shoulder. Helpless laughter that bordered on tears. "Will I be able to keep up to you?" she asked. "Or will I have to trail along half a mile behind?"

"I shall match my strides to yours," he said. "But we will have to get you fit enough not to pant and wheeze as we run."