The book of ghost stories was still open in his hands. His lips were still parted on the final phrase—crumbled to dust even as we gazed upon it. But the phrase, the whole story, had been blown right out of his mind. By the woman, by her beauty. Just the sight of her had brought him from his chair to his feet.

Which was pretty ridiculous when he came to think of it. What was he going to do next? Leap into the air like a cartoon character—his tongue out—his eyes hanging from their sockets on springs—the Valentine shape of his heart boinging through his shirtfront? He was a modern guy, after all, an American guy, a Hollywood guy. A real person with nose hairs and psychiatric problems and an anus. This was life, not the movies. It wasn’t possible—was it?—that he had just fallen in love at first sight?

Maybe not, but he went on gawping at her. She was standing in the drawing-room archway, one of the guests who had drifted in when Storm had begun to read aloud. In the sitting room behind her, the great Scotch pine with its colored Christmas lights seemed to him to frame her, to set her in relief. A girl of, say, twenty and some. Not the sort of anorexic starlet he was used to, not one of his usual airheads inflated with silicon and ambition. Hers was a real figure in low-cut black velvet. A waist and hips of substance, womanly in the extreme. A bosom from the days when bosoms were bosoms. A swanlike neck, damask cheeks, skin of ivory, hair of jet. Brown eyes, the palest brown eyes imaginable, bright and snappy and quick. Woof, he thought; Jesus.

The others around her—all of Bolt’s London sophisticates—had begun to laugh now and applaud her. She was still frozen with the hand that had held the glass extended, with her startled gaze on the fragments where they lay. Fragments and glistening slivers on the tan carpet. A spreading, colorless stain. The glass had just slipped from her fingers apparently, must’ve hit the edge of the butler’s tray on the way down.

“Oh,” she said finally, “how stupid of me.”

Storm reeled inwardly, mentally clutched his chest. What an accent, too, he thought. That real English stuff. Like Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. He could still remember some of his boyhood fantasies about Mary Poppins. The things she would croon to him with that accent. Oh, Richard. Oh, young master!

I’m sorry, he was about to say aloud, sorry if I frightened you. It was just a stupid old ghost story. But he was already coming to his senses. And Bolt, anyway, was out of his armchair, was going to her, and Bolt was the host.

“Oh, Frederick, let me clean it up, I’m an idiot,” she said to him.