"But I should not have done this," he said.

He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, but she knew, all right. He could hear the tears in her voice when she spoke. "John," she said, "please do not. Please do not keep on saying that. I know that it was I who asked you to marry me. It was unpardonably forward of me to do so, and I never would have done it if I had not thought that perhaps you needed me."

"Adèle," he said.

"No," she said. "Talking takes your energy. Just rest. Please rest, my dearest love. John, I wanted to marry you. More man anything else in this world. I love you so very dearly. I have always loved you, from the moment you lifted me down from that stile when I was four and you were eight and the other children were jeering because I was stuck and frightened."

He smiled at the memory of the infant with the soft baby curls and huge eyes.

The memory?

"This is what I have always dreamed of," she said. "Being your wife, John. Being wim you like this. I do not care for how long-" She broke off suddenly and he could hear her distress in the silence. "But you are going to get better. I know you are. I feel it. I am going to make you better. They said you needed a dry, warm climate and so you went off to Italy for a whole year and came back worse. I do not care what they say. This place will be good for you. And I will be good for you."

He pulled on her hand until she was lying beside him again. He turned onto his side to face her.

"You are good for me," he said. "You are all I could ever need, Adèle. How foolish I was to go to Italy and waste a whole year I might have spent with you. But no matter. We have the rest of our lifetimes together."

Her eyes were bright with tears, brimming with love. The rest of a lifetime. How much longer did he have? A few weeks? A few days? And yet, weak as he felt, he did not feel ill. He should, shouldn't he? He had tuberculosis- consumption. Didn't he?

"How long have we been married?" he asked her.

She looked frightened for a moment. Perhaps she thought he was delirious. Then she smiled. She had a dimple in the middle of her right cheek. It had been there since she was a child-How did he know that?

"For shame," she said. "Have you forgotten the number of days? But it was a long journey for you-four days, with the wedding just the day before we set out. It has been five days and four hours, sir. We are an old married couple."

Yes, he knew how long they had been married. He had remembered as soon as he asked the question. He knew, too, that the marriage was unconsummated, that she fully expected it would forever remain so. She had married him anyway.

"I love you," he whispered to her.

Her eyes filled with tears again. "Yes, I know you do, John," she said, "even if not quite as you would have loved a bride if you had had more opportunity to choose. But I know you love me. I am content."

Had he ever given her the impression that he did not love her totally, to the exclusion of all other women? He knew he had. He knew it as soon as he asked the question, silently this time. He had always loved her as a friend. He had loved her, too, as a woman, though there had always been a niggling doubt. Was it just habit that made him believe that he loved her? Did he really love her? Was he prepared to give up all other women in order to spend the rest of his life with her?

Finally the question had become immaterial. He was dying. He had come back from Italy to find her still unmarried at the age of twenty-four, still waiting for him, still loving him. And so he had married her.

But looking at her now, he could hardly believe that he had ever doubted the depth of his feelings for her. There was something about her just a little too soft, a little too dependent, he had thought. He might prefer someone rather more forceful, someone with a more vivid personality. He could not understand why he had never before fully appreciated her strength of character. She had remained true to a dying man. She had married him, knowing that there was no future with him-because she loved him.

And yet-his mind became dizzy with disorientation again. It was not he who had doubted. And it was not he who now loved her with all his heart. That was another man, the one who usually occupied this weak, thin body. He-John Chandler-could have no feelings for Adèle at all. He was in love with Allison Gorman. He was engaged to her. He had just placed on her finger the ring that Adèle was now wearing.

He knew what had happened, of course. He accepted it with a calm that puzzled and amazed him, as if it were an ordinary, everyday occurrence, or as if he finally understood the feelings he had always had about the house and the ring. He had slipped back into history. When he could set his mind to working rationally, he would even be able to work out exactly who in history he was impersonating. He had a smattering of knowledge about the family. And this was a Regency man. He should not be difficult to trace.

"If I had had an opportunity to choose my bride at leisure and in full health," he said, "I know whom I would have chosen."

She closed her eyes. He knew she was steeling herself against pain, though she showed no other outer sign than that.

"The Honorable Miss Adèle Markham," he said softly, "now Adèle Chandler, Viscountess Cordell. How could I ever have chosen anyone else when my heart was given to her?"

Her eyes opened again. "How kind you are," she said. "Kinder than usual." She touched his lips with her fingertips. ' 'And you are talking too much. You will tire yourself and start coughing again."

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.