Walking in a winter wonderland. That was how Peggy Druce thought of Stockholm. It wasn’t that she didn’t know about winter. She’d grown up in a Philadelphia Main Line family, and married into another. She’d skied in Colorado, in Switzerland, and in Austria back in the days when there was an Austria. So it wasn’t that she didn’t understand what winter was all about.

But Philadelphia put up with winter. Ski resorts seemed intent on making money off it-which, when you looked at things from their point of view, was reasonable enough. Stockholm enjoyed winter.

Part of that, no doubt, was enjoying what you couldn’t escape. Scandinavia lay a long way north. If not for the Gulf Stream, it would have been as uninhabitable as Labrador. (She remembered a pulp story about what might happen if the Gulf Stream went away. She couldn’t recall who’d written it: only that he was a Jew. Now that she’d seen Hitler’s Berlin, that took on new weight in her mind.) But the Swedes did it with style. And the way they kept houses comfortable and streets clear of snow put Philadelphia-and every other place she’d visited in winter-to shame.

Not only that, all the lights stayed on through the long, cold nights. After her time inside the Third Reich, that seemed something close to a miracle. It had in Copenhagen, too… till the Germans marched in. Now the Nazis’ twilight swallowed up Denmark, too.

Yes, Stockholm was a wonderful, bright, civilized place. The only problem was, she didn’t want to be here. She had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have been able to come to Marianske Lazne in Czechoslovakia without it, or to maintain herself when the war stranded her on the wrong side of the Atlantic. But, just as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, all her jack couldn’t get her back to the good old US of A, or to the husband she hadn’t seen for well over a year.