“The important thing is for you to get better. Put all this nonsense out of your mind.” He hung over her awkwardly. Touchingly concerned, clumsy, helpless before what he doubtless viewed as her mysteriously feminine inner troubles. “Look,” he went on gently, “I don’t mean to sound like a thoroughgoing egotist. It’s the timing more than anything that suggested it. What I mean is: this ridiculous business at the gallery the other night. It didn’t have anything to do with us, did it? With me, I mean?”

Sophia’s lips parted and closed several times before she could answer. “You are a thoroughgoing egotist,” she said softly then. “No. Don’t be ridiculous. It was just one of my bad patches, that’s all. It’s over now and I feel very silly.”

“Ah,” he said, straightening at once. Smiling; pleased. “Good. Well. Onward and upward, then.” He let her go, clapped his palms together with a hollow report. “Perhaps we’ll get the next one.”

Called from her own thoughts, she looked up at him distantly. “The next one?”

“Yes. Since the auction, there’ve been all sorts of rumors that The Magi wasn’t the only panel of the Rhinehart triptych to turn up in the East. The word is the Madonna may be on the market soon.”

“The Madonna?”

“Yes,” said Sir Michael, rubbing his hands. “The rumor is the third bidder—the bidder on the telephone at the auction—has got it, and is looking for a buyer.”

“Oh,” Sophia said, closing her eyes.

She really was terribly weary of this. And depressed. And alone. And afraid—especially as the night wore on towards dawn. It went round and round in her mind. The Magi—the Madonna—the Resurrection Men—Jon Bremer’s butchered eyes … She should go to the police—and yet what if that meant her father’s arrest—or his ruin? Either one would almost certainly kill him. And she couldn’t trust the police anyway. Whoever this Devil from Hell was, Jon Bremer had said he might have contacts on the police. Well, he might have contacts anywhere. She couldn’t trust anyone, really, couldn’t talk to anyone. Which was nothing new. She never had been able to trust or talk to anyone. She had never confided in a single person her age-old suspicions about Sir Michael, or her childhood memory of that night at Belham Grange. And so it would all just go on and on like this if she didn’t stop it. She would be right back in the same nightmare she’d been in for weeks. For years, really. Really, if it came to that, for all her life.