“I didn’t mean it to become a burden to you,” she said softly.
He smiled. “It isn’t a burden. I’m doing these things because I want to—because I want to see you active and pretty again. I’ll do it, too. You’ll see. Next month you’re going to the spa at Carlsbad.”
She tried to dissuade him, but next month she was bundled up and carried to the train to go to Prague.
It was in Prague that Dale met Ann Wondra, last daughter of a long line of Polish nobility. Ann was dark-haired, quick-eyed, and she could laugh in a way that warmed a man’s blood. At any rate, she warmed Dale Stevenson’s.
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