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.