A Reprise

Linda Ronstadt hearts call hearts fall swallowed in the rain who knows life grows hollow and so vain wandering in the winter light the wicked and the sane bear witness to salvation and life starts over again now the clear sky is all around you love's shadow will surround you all through the night star glowing in the twilight tell me true hope whispers and i will follow till you love me too

As she sat in her room, contemplating the new turn of her life, her thoughts turned to Anton, and his unnerving resemblance to the figment in her dreams. She felt inexplicably drawn to him, as though he were the answer to a puzzle she had worked over in her mind all of her life. She noticed him standing on the balcony, high above her head. Madeleine put her hands to her head, feeling a sudden sense of disorientation. She wanted to shout up to him, to demand the answers from him. But he would think her only mad. Perhaps he was only just there! Perhaps he had not gone there to watch her struggle with her disturbing visions. Did she imagine that he was some sort of sorcerer, and that he had conjured those visions to torment her in her sleep? It could not be! He was not a magician, only a man. But all of this changed for her on the day she met Barbara. Madeleine turned from him in the garden. "I did not know... about Barbara," she said merely. "Didn't you?" he ...

"Oh, Roger..." Margaret pressed one hand to her bosom. "I'm so sorry..." "Don't." His voice was sharp, his expression forbidding. "Don't say anything like that to me about the matter. I'm very happy for Katherine." She reached out to touch his hand, feeling sad at the stabbing pain in his eyes. "Then I am too, of course," she said. A commotion from down the hall made them both look up. The children were running toward them with energetic cries, trailed by a tall, dark-haired man. For a moment, as Margaret met his stern gray eyes, she almost didn't recognize him. The expression on his face chilled her. She jerked her hand away from Roger's and stood quickly. "Drew!" Roger moved toward him quickly. He shook his hand and clapped him on the back. "What a pleasure! It's been too long since I've seen you, old chap." "Roger." Drew's lips upturned in a terse smile and he sho...

This is so embarrassing: I wrote it when I was sixteen. I don't imagine it would be of entertainment to anyone but myself. The prelude is a poem I wrote myself, too, unfortunately. Ah, fickle love! You cannot decide, can you?! Can you?! Thrust me aside and look upon me no more Or kiss me again Even through the near-impermeable walls the storm raged, and as I leaned in an arcade in relief I felt the shudder of thunder. I shivered, and it was then that I realized the cloak I wore was warm, heated with a touch alien to my own, and I shuddered again, in horror, and wrenched it from my shoulders, holding it gingerly in one hand. The walls which surrounded me were unfamiliar, hazy, and seemed even more foreign still as steam rose from an arched, open window and filled the room with curling threads of vapor. There was silence but for the steady roar out of doors. I was not aware that I was in near-darkness until a sudden, alarming orange flame shot up from the wall opposite me. My breath ...

When she was a girl she had gone there once, wading amidst waist-high weeds and picking through the brambles to get to the old cottage. She remembered it somehow. She had found a key in a drawer in an old dresser box in the spare room and had speculated endlessly about what it might open. It was the size and shape of a key which might fit into a door. One day when Kate had been riding with her father she had seen the old cottage and had asked him about it. It's abandoned, he had told her. It was hard now to recall his voice because he had been dead for so many years. She had developed the idea that the key she had found must open the old cottage. It was on her father's property but it had not been inhabited for years. None of the servants seemed to know anything about it. Kate had gone to the cottage at dusk, when her parents were occupied with preparing dinner and finishing up household tasks. She had opened the door with the key she had found and had entered the small buildin...