"Up hills?" she said, still laughing. "Hills, John? Have mercy."

He even went outside on that second day and strolled very slowly with her along the graveled paths between the flower beds that stood between the house and the rough trail that descended the hill to one side of the house and ascended on the other side to the village of Awelfa, just out of sight over the crest.

He stopped frequently to draw deep breaths of the fresh salt air. She was terrified that he would bring on another of the coughing spells. He had not had one since just after their arrival the day before.

And then once, before they strolled on, he dipped his head and kissed her. He kissed her the way he had kissed her yesterday-and never before that-with his lips parted and his tongue stroking over her lips and even pressing through. A shocking, wonderful kiss. One that made her knees turn weak. A fine prop she would make for him if he kept kissing her like this.

And that was the biggest change in him, she thought, and the one she had been most trying to ignore, because she had accepted the way he was and had thought to be happy with it long after he had gone. She had accepted that he loved her but that there was no magic in his love.

Since their arrival, since that coughing spell and the short sleep of exhaustion that had followed it, he had been different. There had been something in his eyes, something in his voice, something in his kiss… And something in his words, too, though she guessed he was speaking them out of tenderness and gratitude to her. He knew that she loved him more than life and he knew that she was going to have a leftover life to live very soon. He was being wonderfully kind to her as he always had been.

But there was something in his eyes. The eyes cannot deceive as well as the voice can.

On the third day he decided that they would go walking on the beach.

"John." They were in the dining room at the time, having just risen from breakfast. ' 'Is it wise? You are so much better. Would it not be wiser to rest today? To get your strength back gradually?" She stepped closer to him and framed his face with her hands. "There is even a little color in your face today."

"Perhaps in time," he said, "you will even have a halfway handsome husband, Adèle."

His face blurred beyond the tears that sprang to her eyes. "You are the most handsome man in the world," she said.

He laughed-oh, how she loved to hear him laugh. "Did you not know," he asked her, "that the most sure way to build strength and energy is to use them?"

He had some strange ideas, this new John who had appeared just the day before yesterday. "How absurd," she said.

"They are just like love," he said.

She smiled at the idea. Yes, it was true. The more love one gave, the more there was to give. But strength and energy? She was not at all convinced by the analogy. She could see, though, that he wanted to walk on the beach, that he wanted to believe his strange theory. She could see that he was happy here at Cartref. Why should she try to curb his happiness merely so that she could guard his little remaining strength and keep him with her a few days longer? She had married him so that she could love him into the next world.

"Do it, then, you foolish man," she said. "I shall even come with you. But do not expect me to carry you home."

"Soon," he said, "I'll be able to do that for you, Adèle." His eyes softened, filled with that look again, the one that made her breathless because it was new and unexpected and undreamed of. "I want to be whole for you. I am going to be whole for you."

She had expected nothing of this marriage except a fulfillment of her own dream. She ached with sudden longings that she did not want to feel. She did not want to have more pain than there was going to be anyway.

And yet there was the hope. And the knowledge.

"To the beach," he said, taking her hand and leading her to the door. "No more procrastinating."

"To the beach, sir," she said, trying to match the lightness of his tone.


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

He had only one real fear and it was a fear that puzzled him at best and made him feel guilty at worst. He feared being suddenly projected forward into his own life again- though there seemed nothing particularly alien about this life. He feared every time he woke up from sleep that he would be back in the Cartref Hotel in the middle of the 1990s.

It was a fear that puzzled him. Could he want to be trapped in a former age, cut off forever from the life he had known for twenty-eight years? Could he want to live without the trappings of late-twentieth-century civilization? And without the conveniences-electric lights and shavers, central heating, running water, zippers, to mention just a few. And without his red sports car?

And it was a fear that made him feel guilty. Could he be content never to see his father again? Or his other relatives and friends? Or Allison? He had just become engaged to Allison. She was the woman he loved, the woman he had decided to spend the rest of his life with.

And yet he feared having to go back. He feared having to leave Cartref and his sense of belonging there. He feared-oh, he feared more than death having to leave Adèle. How would he ever cope with the grief of being separated from her by the insurmountable barrier of almost two centuries?

He did not fear having been projected back into the body of a desperately sick, dying man. He could be deceiving himself, of course. He knew that it was possible to be very ill and not even realize it until a chance medical checkup revealed a problem. But even so he felt convinced that he was only weak, not sick. All he needed in order to get back his full health and strength was food and rest and exercise. He was certainly in the right place for all three, despite the horror Adèle and his servants felt for his insistence on exercising.

Perhaps what cheered him most of all was that memory he had from his studies of family history. The memory of John and Adèle Chandler, who had begun their married life in the Regency era but had lived on with their children well into the Victorian age. Sometimes he wished that he had learned more about them and that his memory was sharper. But then, he decided, he did not really want to know exactly when they had died or who had died first. And he did not really want to remember how many children they had had-though he did know that it was more than one. If he was to live the life of the Regency Chandler, he did not want to know any more about his future than the fact that it was to be a lengthy one, with Adèle at his side.

He put a cloak on over his coat and his waistcoat and his shirt to go to the beach, despite the fact that it was a warm day. Adèle would have been too upset if he had refused. And he wore a hat, though he was afraid that it might blow away in the wind. It was probably wise to dress warmly anyway-his emaciated body felt the cold. It would do him no good to catch a cold in his weakened state.

Adèle looked remarkably pretty with a yellow spencer over her matching dress and a straw bonnet trimmed with blue flowers. He had always felt a treacherous preference for the femininity of female dress of a century and more ago, though Allison's clothes were always chic and elegant and sexy.

But the prettiest thing about Adèle was her face. Despite her anxiety that he was going to tax his strength too much, there was a glow of joy in her face that he knew he had put there in the past two days. He knew that he had aroused hope in her-it was another cause for fear if he should have to go back and take his tuberculosis resistance with him. And he knew that he had surprised her by the depth of his need for her and his love for her. He knew that the John she had married had never felt more than a deep affection and tenderness for her.

She deserved more. She had devoted all of her love for all of her life to him. He knew that she would go on loving him for the rest of her life, even if he should die tomorrow and she should live on to be eighty or ninety. He knew that her love for him was that deep.

"Are you ready?" he asked her, offering his arm. "Though this is a deceptive gesture, is it not? It seems that 1 am offering you my support when in reality I am begging for yours. I hope you noticed this morning, though, that I paused on each stair for only five seconds instead of five minutes."

"Yes." She smiled wistfully at him. "I noticed." He wondered if she was fighting hope or if she was beginning to give in to it. "I do believe you have put on weight, too."

"All of half a pound, I daresay," he said. "Though I believe it is the cloak that makes me look voluminous. Wait until it is filled by the wind on the beach. You will be putting me on a reducing diet."

It irked him to have to descend the stairs so slowly, to have to walk so slowly from the house and around the cobbled driveway to the road-or track would be a more suitable word-and across it to the grass and then the beach. There was just not the strength to stride along as he wished to do. But when he remembered how just the day before yesterday every step had taken almost all his strength, he decided that he must make a friend of patience for the coming days and weeks.

She chattered to him-mainly to try to keep him from using precious energy in talk, he guessed. Though he could remember that she had always liked to walk and chatter with him. Only him. Other people knew her as a shy, quiet, not particularly interesting lady. It was as if she saw him as the other half of her soul and could talk with him as freely as she could think.

He drew her to a halt when they were on the beach and shaded his eyes against the sun sparkling on the water. The tide was almost out. The beach was wide and flat and golden.

"The beginning of eternity," he said. "It is a wonderful place to live, Adèle, close to the ocean. One is constantly reminded of the vastness of life and eternity. And of God. And yet it is an awareness without fear. One feels a part of it all, a part of eternity. I never fear death when I am here."

He could never speak thus with Allison, he realized. She would either think he had taken leave of his senses or she would plain not comprehend.

The brim of Adèle's bonnet touched his shoulder. "You are right," she said. "It is a very good place to be. I am glad we came here, John. You could not have brought me to a better place."

He drew his arm free of hers and set it about her shoulders. After all, they were on the beach and some of the proprieties could be allowed to slip away there. Besides, he had brought some of his twentieth-century lack of inhibitions with him. She looked first startled and then very pleased indeed. The wind and salt air had already whipped color into her cheeks.

"I am not going to die," he said. "Not yet, anyway. I am better, my love. All I need is to regain my strength. I know you will not quite believe it yet-perhaps not for a long while. But it is true."

Pray God-he closed his eyes to make it a real prayer- that he could stay with her, or that at the very least his own health would stay with the man who would return to her. And pray God that that man, if he must return, would love her as she deserved to be loved.

"I believe it," she said softly. Her voice was trembling. "I do believe it, John. I knew when we were coming here and even more so when I saw Cartref and the valley and the beach and ocean-I knew that a miracle was going to happen."

"It has," he said. "A greater miracle than you realize, I believe."

He took her hand in his and began to walk with her toward the water. Through her glove his thumb and forefinger played with the ring on her finger. This was what he had imagined doing, he thought, when he had suggested a week at the Cartref Hotel with Allison. He had imagined quiet walks on the beach, rambles in the hills, browsings in the village of Awelfa. Long afternoons and nights of lovemaking. He was not at all sure that Allison would have enjoyed any of it except the lovemaking. She needed the hectic pace of city life as a constant stimulant, he realized.

He did not.

He felt the now familiar dizziness for a moment. How could he be doing this, strolling inside someone else's body with someone else's wife two hundred years ago, and not be feeling either alarm for his own sanity or panic at having slipped through some time warp? But it was not someone else's body. It was his own. He recognized himself in the mirror even though he did not look quite identical to his usual self. And he recognized himself inside. He had all of Viscount Cordell's memories, though some of them were coming back to him slowly. And Adèle was his wife, his beloved wife, even though their marriage was unconsum-mated.