He picked it up from the table where it lay in readiness, leaned toward the flames—and then found he no longer had the will to burn it. He folded it up again and replaced it in his wallet. It was a small weakness, he told himself; in no way did it alter his determination to put her out of his mind.

His conscious mind, of course; that determination did not prevent her returning to him at night, in his dreams. It was from one such dream, tranquil and resonant with the illusory promises of dreams, that Max roused him, at three o’clock one morning, to announce that Charlotte had just given birth to their first daughter. In April, Rowland received an invitation to the christening of this child, to be held the following month.

May; Rowland accepted. He was touched by the request, and touched by Max’s obvious joy and pride. “We’d like you to be the godfather,” Max said in his office one day over a sandwich lunch. “Charlotte insists. You predicted it would be a girl, after all.”

“Delighted. An honor.” Rowland smiled.

“Charlotte’s asking Tom to be the other godfather…”

“A very good choice. I like Tom.”

“Godmothers—we’re not sure yet. One of Charlotte’s sisters, probably…” Max gave Rowland a small sidelong glance. “And then we thought, Lindsay perhaps…”

Rowland merely nodded. His attention rarely left work for long these days, as Max had noted, and now it had already returned to the story on Max’s desk, which they would run the next day.

Written by Gini, and faxed in by her directly to Max, it detailed the raid made that week on the Amsterdam drug manufacturing outfit, and the subsequent arrest of the Dutch chemist and the American pusher behind it. The story seemed of greater interest to Rowland than the details of Max’s daughter’s christening and the identity of her godmothers.

Noting this, Max sighed and, as soon as Rowland had left his office, telephoned his wife, who—an obstinate romantic—still cherished hopes on Lindsay’s behalf.

Charlotte questioned Max for a while, with vivacity. Max, who felt he knew Rowland better than his wife did, and who knew he was in a better position to judge Rowland’s present state of mind, heard her out patiently. He then began the gentle process of making Charlotte face facts. Finally opting for a racing analogy, he informed her that the odds against Lindsay were—at very best—one hundred to one.

“Darling, listen to reason,” he said. “I promise you, I know. Lindsay is a total long shot.”

Charlotte made dismissive noises. It was not unknown, she reminded him, for total long shots to romp home.

Lindsay, who gambled rarely and always incautiously, might have agreed with her. She had spent the past months trying to subdue such instincts, but did not always succeed. She was not assisted by the fact that the months since Paris had given her time to consider, and time to make certain observations of her own.