His eyes adjusted to the darkness of the porch, which was more deeply shadowed where Lauretta sat because of the wisteria vines. The leaves were dying but had not yet let go. She was alone, as she had said. She sat in a high-backed rocking chair that had been a favorite of his mother’s, and she had a woolen shawl around her shoulders, such as Deborah might have worn against the chill of an autumn evening.

“I should go in, Lauretta. There are some figures I want to set down in the books while they’re fresh on my mind.”

She smiled, and although he could not read her eyes, he could see her teeth white in the darkness. “My goodness, how you treat me like a leper! I am not, you know. I am a perfectly normal woman in a—what they call a natural condition, if not quite a natural situation.”

Leon bowed stiffly. “You will please excuse me.” He turned to go.

“No! I do not excuse you, sir; come back!” Leon stopped. Her voice both threatened and cajoled. “Stay and talk to me. I am all alone, as you see.” She lifted a hand, palm up, to beckon “Come here; sit beside me.” He went toward her cautiously, but did not take her hand, and after a moment she let it fall to the arm of her chair.

“Well,” he said, “what is it?”

“Sit down.”

He did so, on a chair out of her hand’s reach.

“I fear you are heartless.”

“I hope I am not that,” he said irritably.

She settled herself back in her chair, as if having brought him to her, she now had no fear of losing him. “We have not talked at all since I came.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, Leon.” She laughed intimately. “Your voice bristles with fear. You’re not at all the free and happy cavalier you appeared to be when we met in Charleston!” She smiled without humor, for her satisfaction alone.

“Am I the father of the child you will have?”

“What a very cruel and insulting thing to say to me! If you were not, do you think I could accept your hospitality? Reluctant though it has been.”

“It has not been reluctant, Lauretta.”

“Well then, nervous.”

“I ask you again: Will it be my child?”

“Do you suggest that it was sired by that great and shining Thespian light, Roderick Conyngham, admired of kings? Will it, do you think, enter the world declaiming, ‘To be or not to be’? And what will your answer be to that?”

“Don’t be flippant, Lauretta. You are quizzing me.”

“I shall stop, if you show that you have something still of the regard for me I believed you to have in Charleston.”

“What happened in Charleston has nothing to do with here and now.”

“Oh, it has everything to do with here and now!”