They went hunting together. They ate dinner together. They rode together. They visited Marillyn together, and after they came away from Marillyn in her wheelchair, Ann said, when he stopped the car on the top of a high hill in the moonlight from where they could see her ancestral castle, “You’re determined that she shall get well, aren’t you, Dale?”
“Of course,” he said.
“What will you do if she doesn’t?”
He refused to consider that. “She will,” he said confidently.
By that time Dale’s arms were tightly around her. So, for that matter, were Ann’s around Dale.
“You are quite sure,” Ann said cautiously.
“I suppose,” he said, in an abrupt humbleness, “it’s a fixation by now. It’s something I recognize as a problem, and the best way to cure it is to cure Marillyn. When I go out on a party, or when I am extravagant, it nicks my conscience, because Marillyn made all these things possible for me in the first place.”
“It isn’t your fault that she’s an invalid, is it?”
“Not directly, no, although she didn’t want to take that trip. However, I don’t think it’s that as much as it is the feeling that if I get too much interested in other things I might neglect her—that is, I might be somewhere else doing something for fun just at the time when the opportunity would come to get her cured. Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so,” she said gently.
“For instance,” he went on, very much concerned with making her understand, “if I should spend a lot of money on other things—say, for instance, that I should marry you and we’d build a home and all—that would take a lot of money and it would make me unconsciously less eager to find a cure for Marillyn because deep down I’d know I might not be able to pay for it.”
Ann drew back in her arms. Her black eyes reflected the starlight. “Dale, what did you say? Did you say ‘if I should marry you’?”
He looked back at her. “Uh-huh.”
“You’ve never even said you loved me.”
He kissed her very tenderly on the lips. “I do,” he said.
Then they kissed so fiercely that the Bryd, listening in solely to get an angle on this whole business, got excited and very nearly got stuck crosswise in the time-stream.
But two weeks later Dale went to his post on sun-station No. 18, and started making Paris days last all night. Six months later he was back for a visit, and Marillyn said, “I’d like to go home, Dale. After all, you’ve done your part and much more. And this isn’t helping me. It’s pleasant and all that, but it won’t make me walk. I could go to the sanatorium in Florida and it would be just as pleasant and much less expensive. Then you could pursue a normal course of life.”
Dale pretended to bristle. “What do you mean by that?”
Marillyn smiled. “Ann is in love with you, Dale. She visits me often, and you should see her eyes sparkle when we mention you. Dale, will you see her tonight?”
“Maybe I will,” he said, “but there won’t be any marriage until you are well.”
“You’ve been apart six months now,” Marillyn said softly. “Maybe if you see her you will change your mind.”
Ann would be a wonderful wife. She was much like Marillyn—dark-haired, quick-moving, dignified but warm, affectionate, and loyal. His wife would have to be loyal, of course, like Marillyn. That was essential.
He hired a car that afternoon and drove out to the castle to surprise Ann. He reached the grounds just before dark, so he parked the car on the hill where Ann and he had been that last night. Maybe she and he would walk back there later.
He started to walk through the grounds, and when he reached the flower garden it was almost dark. He walked along the cinder-path by the roses, then cut across the grass. He heard murmuring voices, and a moment later he saw Ann walking in the garden. With her was a man, and his arm was around her. The man stopped to snap off a rose. He turned to Ann with a graceful, almost feminine gesture, and she smiled. Then with elaborate and intimate motions he pinned the rose in her hair.
Dale was hurt. He went back quietly to the car. Of course he had not asked her to marry him, but then he had mentioned it—and couldn’t she be loyal to his memory? Dale was filled with unexpected jealousy.
After a restless night he had just about rationalized the entire situation. He knew the scene in the garden did not necessarily mean anything. He would phone Ann, mention last night, and of course she would explain. Then he picked up the morning telepaper from London and read in the gossip column that Ann Wondra, the Polish beauty, might soon announce her engagement to Georges Raoul Dumont, son of the French ambassador. Dale was stricken—
And was still in that state of mind, the Bryd saw, when a man came to his hotel room that afternoon. “You are in charge of sun-station No. 18, over Paris, I believe.”
This was very interesting to the Bryd, because it saw that the man was cleverly masked with a plastiform shell that did not at all appear to be a mask.
“Yes,” Dale said glumly.
The man’s eyes looked speculative. He glanced at the telepaper on Dale’s bed, and the Bryd, figuratively speaking—for of course the Bryd was nothing but pure energy—opened its eyes. For the Bryd knew the man’s thought, and was astonished to learn that Dale had been closely watched for some time. Following the scene in the flower garden, the item in the telepaper had been especially arranged to produce a certain reaction in Dale Stevenson without Ann Wondra’s knowledge.
“You know, of course,” the man said, “that France is about to disturb world peace by invading
