Only hours since she had stepped into the plane from the winter night of a northern city, Miss Clelia Kingslake was breathing mild morning air by the Aegean. The sun streamed down on valley, rock, and green hill, and the driver leaned against his taxi in his shirtsleeves. Miss Kingslake’s pang of ecstasy was not a bit the less for her having recently entered her fortieth year—quite the reverse, in fact. All the same, when her baggage was aboard and they drove off, she became distracted from her new surroundings, wondering if she could possibly have missed her as yet unknown colleagues. She was to have been met at the airport; so she had been assured before leaving Organization Headquarters the night before. There had been no one the least colleague-like in the waiting room, and in any case they would have approached her. It didn’t matter—she could manage for herself and they had more important things to do. For the time being, the entire region was dependent on their vigilance. After all, wasn’t this an emergency mission?

The taxi rattled through a fertile valley toward the sea. When they reached the corniche, the driver slowed down, pointed out a row of Turkish houses, asked her why she had come to Rhodes.

She explained, on an assignment for the Organization.

“Ah sì. La NATO.”

Oh no, no. NATO was a military organization. Hers was a peace-keeping one.

The driver shrugged at this subtlety. He could not be bothered splitting hairs, and lost interest. Did she see those mountains across the sea? That was the coast of Turkey. And here, as they swung around a curve, was the city of Rhodes.

Clelia Kingslake had a glimpse of golden walls, of white shipping, of a tower, a fortress. She was revisited by ecstasy. A moment later she found herself in a driveway.

The hotel was formlessly vast, and brown—a dated wartime brown suggestive of inverted camouflage, as if it had been willfully disguised as a military installation. Upstairs, however, unlatching the shutters of a charming, old-fashioned room, she looked down over terraces and a pebbled beach to the sea and, once more, out to the blue Turkish coast. The open French windows formed, with their outside railing, a narrow balcony. She pulled up a chair and, leaning her arm on the rail and her chin on her arm, sat there in the winter sunshine, happy.

Clelia Kingslake was happy because, first of all, she was a Canadian. Fished out of the Annual Reports Pool at Headquarters, where she held a superior clerical post, flown to Rhodes at one day’s notice, arriving there to sunlight and sea, to trees in leaf, flowers in bloom, to the luxury of finding herself beside the Mediterranean—all this by itself might not have been thoroughly enjoyable to her strict northern soul had she not come to assist in a noble undertaking. She had been sent to serve the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean in their hour of need, and it was this that sanctioned her almost sensual pleasure in her surroundings as she sat gazing out from the Hotel of the Roses.