Phoenix and Ashes

uncertainly.

'Women,' he elaborated. 'A gaggle of women. Invited by my mother, with malice and intent. Those that weren't there on their own to simper and flirt at me, were mothers eyeing the goods before they set their own daughters on the scent.' He shuddered. 'I felt like the only fox in the county with three hunts in the field at once.'

She couldn't help it; she had to laugh at that. Especially considering that Alison and the girls must have been in that group he so openly despised.

And they thought they were the only ones with an invitation to tea! That was more than enough to make her smile. Oh, they would be so angry when they came home! They hadn't reckoned on there being competition. They should have, though. Reggie would have been quite a prize before the war, and now, with so many young men dead in France and Flanders, he was an even greater prize.

And the best part was that they would be blaming one another. Alison would be blaming the girls for not being sufficiently charming to keep Reggie there, and the girls would be blaming their mother for not knowing this was going to be a competition staged by Reggie's mother, inadvertently or on purpose. There was not a single thing that any of them could blame on her, so they would make poisonous jibes at each other, or stare sullenly, all through dinner.

And meanwhile, here he was, the object of their hunt, hiding from them.

'I'll go if you want to be alone,' she offered. It only seemed fair. He'd come here to be alone, hadn't he? 'I just—I just wanted to go somewhere today where I could pretend that—all that —hadn't happened. At least for a while.'

'I wanted the same thing,' he said, and somehow, the wistful, yet completely hopeless way in which he said it, made her heart ache for him. 'And—no, Miss Robison—' 'Eleanor,' she said, instantly.

He smiled a little. 'Then if I am to call you Eleanor, you must promise to call me Reggie. No, please don't go. I'm not much company, but I don't want to think I've driven you away from the only peaceful place you can find.'

He patted the tree-trunk beside him in a kind of half-hearted invitation to sit; instead, she sat down in the grass at his feet.

He looked a great deal different from the last time she had seen him, and it wasn't just the little moustache or the close-cropped military haircut. He was very pale, and every movement had a nervous quality to it, like one of those high-bred miniature greyhounds that never seems entirely sure something isn't going to step on it or snatch it up and bite it in two. He was also very thin, much thinner than she remembered him being.

And his eyes, his gray-blue eyes, were the saddest things about him. 'Haunted' was the very expression she would have used, had anyone asked her. These were eyes that had seen too much, too much loss, too much horror.

She felt tongue-tied, at a loss for anything to say to him, and it was clear that he felt the same. Finally, she said, in desperation, knowing that the topic of an automobile was at least safe, 'I heard your motorcar go past the other night. Is it a very fast one?'

With relief, he seized the neutral subject as a drowning man seizes a plank, and went into exacting, excruciating detail about the auto. She had to admit, although she didn't care a jot about the insides of the thing, the other things he could tell her about the auto itself were fascinating. Evidently its type had won many races, and there was no doubt that he was as proud of it as he had been of his aeroplane.

And something instinctively warned her about not talking about flying, though she couldn't have told what. Perhaps it was the vague recollection of hearing his wounds had come when he had crashed. Perhaps it was because he himself didn't bring the subject up, and before he had gone off to the war, that had been the one thing in his life he had been the most passionate about.

When he ran out of things to tell her about his motorcar, she asked about what he had read for at Oxford, and what his friends had been like. He relaxed, more and more, as he spoke of these things, and she thought she just might be doing him some good. Finally, when he looked as if he was searching a little too hard for another good story, she smiled, and asked, 'I have some bread and jam. Would you like to share my tea?'

And at that, he laughed weakly, and quoted, ' 'Better a dinner of herbs where love is?' Yes, thank you, I should very much like to share your tea. And—' He reached down behind the trunk of the tree and brought up an old rucksack, rummaging around in it for a moment. 'Well, yes, good, my old instincts have not failed me; as I fled the harpies, I carried off provender. I can provide drink. I have two bottles of ginger-beer.'

With great solemnity he opened the bottles and handed her one; she passed over half of her slightly squashed jam sandwiches.

'I think it was very rude of your mother not to have warned you that guests were coming,' she said bluntly, after they clinked bottles. 'Especially so many. That was not at all fair.'

'Yes, well, if she'd told me I'd have done the bunk beforehand, now, wouldn't I?' he replied logically. 'I suppose now I'll have to find some excuse to avoid teatime every day from now on—'