After that they had both tried very hard to be pragmatic. Hand in hand, they explored. They searched for defects. Solemnly, Pascal tapped walls, inspected wiring and plumbing; equally solemnly, Gini examined a kitchen she knew she loved at first sight. They discovered there was a second bedroom, on the studio level, a small, romantic turret bedroom, a domain Rackham might have drawn for some fairy-tale princess. It was a room made for a child with imagination. Gini could see Pascal, thinking of his daughter.

She said, “Marianne could come to stay, Pascal.”

“She could,” he said. “She would love this room.”

For a while after that, neither of them quite dared to speak. They returned to the huge studio room, and stood holding hands in front of that tall, glorious window. Pascal jangled the keys the agent had given him. They looked at each other; Pascal’s gray eyes lit with amusement. He knew that she was about to voice the unspoken. Before she could do so, he lifted his hand and rested his fingers lightly against her lips.

“No. Wait,” he said. “You’re about to be sensible. Before you’re sensible, I have to do this.”

He lifted her long, pale hair away from her face. He looked into her eyes, then, drawing her toward him, bent and kissed her on the lips.

The embrace was long, and it left her shaken, her mind in disarray; he had, she thought, intended this. She drew away from him at last, with a smile and a shake of the head. She laced her fingers in his and examined his face from a safer distance, arm’s length. She watched the sunlight move across the darkness of his hair, across the planes of his face. She loved the line of his brows; she loved every aspect of his face, every inflection in his voice, every variation in his touch. Finely attuned to him, she knew precisely what he was thinking. It was there in every lineament, in the set of his mouth and in the glint of amusement that still lit his eyes. Nonetheless, the unspoken had to be voiced sooner or later.

“It’s too expensive,” she said, “we have to face facts.”

Pascal, the most determined man she had ever known, a man who could always contrive to get himself to the back of beyond, by yesterday, when there were no flights, gave a shrug. He began to pace the room. Gini, familiar with his refusal ever to accept defeat, watched him with quiet affection. She had seen him like this before, when he worked. Pascal, who could argue or charm his way past any barricade or impediment, Pascal, who, failing to get in some front entrance, would always contrive a way in through the side or the back, Pascal, who went into war zones and brought back the pictures no one else could get.

Gini tried to concentrate. She added up, again, the money she could expect from the sale of her own London apartment; the money Pascal thought could be raised from the sale of his Paris atelier; the figures the mortgage companies had mentioned. No matter how she added up those figures, the discrepancy was huge. She gave a sigh; Pascal, undaunted as always, returned to her at once. He put his arm around her waist.