If he didn't elect to remain in Paris overnight.

If something didn't go wrong.

If Ernchester hadn't seen him...

If he's staying in Paris, she thought, dabbing jam and Devonshire cream on a scone and then setting it on the plate to gaze at the darkening windows, he'll wire me. He'll let me know.

And if he didn't?

She wondered if she could reach him by wiring the consulate or the Foreign Office- or was it the War Office that operated the Secret Service? Where was the Foreign Office in Paris, anyway? Like most girls of wealthy family, her experience of the City of Lights had been stringently limited by her preceptors to the Champs Elysees and the Rue de la Paix. If she telephoned the Foreign Office in London -would that be in Whitehall? Parliament? Scotland Yard?-they would only tell her lies .

She felt helpless, frightened, uncertain of what to do, because, unlike medical research, this was something for which she had never prepared. And in any case, she realized, only now seeing the darkness beyond the curtain, they'd all have gone home by this time. As if to echo an affirmative, the Louis XV clock on the parlor mantel downstairs sang its five clear notes. So all she could do was wait.

She fell asleep sometime after midnight across the foot of the bed, still wearing her fluffy rose-point tea gown, the eye of a maelstrom of medical journals that spread to the bedroom's door, and dreamed of crumbling houses in ancient cities, their stones mortared with dark blood and cobweb; of half-seen forms whispering in shadows centuries deep.

By morning James had not returned. But it wasn't until his second telegram that she decided to go up to London and seek out such a house herself.