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"No!"

"Good. And you had some red stuff around your waist that went down in a sort of fold all the way to your feet and your mouth was very beautiful and red, just the color of the sash thing, and your eyes very blue, and I loved you." He held her again so her head came against his shoulder. "My star, all done up in red, white and blue, very fancy, very dignified, very beautiful. How was I to recognize you in a nurse's uniform, in the middle of the Atlantic, with your hair in a little wad on your neck, after a night spent in a lifeboat? Nuts. Petrarch wouldn't have recognized Laura in a Mother Hubbard."

"This is not a Mother Hubbard!"

"Then you see, last night, I realized it was you. The girl I'd been in love with all that time."

"You can't have been! You . . ."

"Well, I wanted to be in love with you! I think I was, really. At least I was exposed to it, so it only took a second look five years later to make it come alive. My figures of speech are mixed, but I'm not. Look, Marcia, I'm talking a lot of nonsense. But"—he held her so he could look deeply into her eyes —"but I do love you. It, well, it just happened. Like that. That meeting that wasn't a meeting five years ago doesn't really have much to do with it except that I liked you right away, the first instant I saw you, standing there at the concert. That's been a long time and a lot of things have happened and in some ways I suppose we are different people. But that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is you and me and the people we are now."

That sunny, long-ago October in Paris, concerts on chill fall nights—and Mickey.

Mickey the one she was going to marry, the man she'd waited for and loved. Loved? she thought suddenly. But that had nothing to do with love! That was, well, what? And it didn't matter; she couldn't analyze it, for now she knew all in a minute about love and the quality of love. The new Marcia had informed her; every drop of blood in her body, hammering in her pulses had informed her.

And she was to marry Mickey.

He saw the change in her face.

"What is it? What's wrong? Tell me . . ." and then he guessed. "You've remembered Andre."

She must have made some gesture of assent, for his face changed subtly; it became older, harder, uncommunicative. He took his arm away and got out cigarettes. "I see. Andre . . . Help me light this blasted thing, will you? I can manage, but . . ."

She took the lighter and held it for him until the cigarette between his lips showed red. He did not meet her eyes though when she looked up. "Thanks," he said, and took the lighter and dropped it in his pocket. "This crazy arm of mine."

She glanced at the white sling supporting his right arm. "You were in combat?"

Yes." His face had no youth or gaiety or tenderness; even his voice was remote and impersonal. "I stayed around Paris that first winter. It was a"—he paused and smoked and said, looking out over her shoulder into the fog—"it was a busy winter. One way and another. Then in the spring when the Germans came . . ." Again he paused; there was also a hiatus in his story, for he said finally: "I eventually got home by way of England and into uniform. I was sent back to England and then to Brittany. From there my story is just the same as everybody's, except I didn't get a scratch until just before the war was over. Then I got a piece of shrapnel in my shoulder. They dug it out and it is healing. Well, the story of my life again." Without a change in face or voice, he said: "What are you going to do about this—Andre?"

Mickey, not Andre. Mickey who needed her, who had come back to her.

She moved away from Josh, not realizing she had moved. The deck under her feet was real. The railing, wet and cold under her fingers, was real, too. Not this world she had so lately and bewilderingly discovered in the embrace of the man who walked across, following her, and leaned against the railing.

Josh said again, but as if a long time had elapsed, as if something had changed since he had spoken: "What are you going to do about Andre?"

She would not look at him. "I'm going to marry Andre."

"Why?" said Josh quietly.

"Because . . ." She stopped. It was as if the memory of Josh's kiss had the power to press upon her lips, silencing them. Josh said evenly: "You were going to say because you love him. Do you?"

She had to break through the strange and lovely spell upon her lips. She said, unsteadily, staring down at the black water rushing away from the ship: "I've told you. We were to be married. He was sent to a German concentration camp. I stayed there, in France, waiting. Hoping . . . Then finally he came back. As you see him. His hands . . . You heard what he said. ..."

"I've heard," said Josh Morgan rather grimly, "what a lot of men have said and experienced. Is that why you are marrying him? From pity, I mean?"

Pity? She said, after a moment, stiffly: "He came back to me. I'm the only thing he has left from a life of . . ." She checked herself, on the verge of telling Joseph of Mickey, and of all the glow and triumph that life had given him and promised him before the Nazis took it away.

And Josh said coolly: "What about Gili?"

Gili?

"That was nothing."

"Don't try to lie to me, Marcia. You can't get by with it. What exactly did she do to you yesterday? It was something about Andre, wasn't it? Had she staked out a claim upon him?"

"No. That is, it was not true. She happened to be at the same hotel in Lisbon, while we were waiting for a passage on the Lerida. He never saw her before that."

"I see." His profile was clear and brown against the thick, pearly curtains of fog. "I gather that Gili claimed to have come to Lisbon in order to join Andre."

"Yes, but . . ."

"How did she happen to tell you? Exactly what brought it on? Do you know?"

"She had borrowed his cigarette case. I saw it and recognized it. It was, oh, very silly, really."

"Go on," said Josh inexorably. "What did she say about Andre?"

She did not want to tell him and she had to. "She said that he had come back to me because I had money—some money, enough, and that he needed money for himself and—she said, for her. It was stupid of me to listen to her."

"Well," said Josh reflectively, "Gili is a predatory and unscrupulous little . . . Well, never mind that. She could be serious, or she could be simply malicious and stupid, trying to make trouble between you. That's true. The point is do you believe Andre?"

"Yes. He loves me; he needs me. It sounds trite. . . ."

"Very," said Josh suddenly irritable. "You're being childish. You're seeing yourself as the heroine of some play. Either you love him or you don't."

She thought of Mickey, and the way he had looked when he came to her in Marseilles, and said quickly: "I love him."

Then she felt the almost sickening shock of irrevocability. Words once said cannot be unsaid, no matter how swift, how defiant, or how false they may be.

But she was to marry Mickey, she told herself bleakly. Even if she had tried to take back the words she had spoken, those hasty words, too final, she could not, for Josh, sealing that finality, said abruptly: "All right. That's that. We'll get onto another subject. And God knows there are several other subjects at hand. You've heard about Urdiola? What do you think of it? Seems reasonable, doesn't it, that he did it?"