TRYST

by

Elswyth Thane

Foreword by Leigh Michaels

First published 1939

This edition 2019

This is a work of fiction. The characters have no existence outside the imagination of the author.

He was the man she was born to love... If only he wasn't dead.

As Europe is about to explode into world war, a bullet goes astray and a British secret agent is hit. But he was not supposed to die. Back at home, waiting for a man she's never met—the man she is destined to love—is the girl he would have married... if he had come home the way fate intended, not as a ghost.

As their destiny labors to put things right, the two fall in love during one beautiful English summer, just before the outbreak of World War II.

TRYST (noun): A private romantic rendezvous between lovers.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

About the author

About the editor

FOREWORD

As a romantic-minded teenager (I wrote my own first romance novel at the tender age of fourteen, when I still believed I knew everything), I read Emilie Loring and Mary Stewart – both pioneers in romantic suspense – and Grace Livingston Hill, an early writer of inspirational romance. But it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I stumbled across Elswyth Thane and discovered paranormal romance through the elegant and touching Tryst.

Tryst is the heartwarming story of Sabrina Archer, young and vulnerable and just coming into womanhood, and Hilary Shenstone, the man who was born to be her one true love – except for a small hitch in the cosmic plan...

...Because Hilary is dead, the victim of a stray bullet on his last mission as a British secret agent in India shortly before the start of World War II. He’s come home, as a ghost, to find Sabrina waiting for him.

“Something slipped....” Hilary says in the book. “The timing went wrong.”

While destiny – obstinate and unswerving – labors to correct the error and finally put things right, the star-crossed pair fall in love against a background of endless and beautiful English summer.

Tryst was first published in 1939, just as a global war was about to explode. The outlook was terrifying, Sabrina found:

“New problems presented themselves faster than old ones got solved ... Sometimes the prospect ... oppressed her with such a terror ... that she lay awake in the dark in a hopeless funk, trying to pray without knowing what for.”

Against the terrifying likelihood of years-long war, deprivation, sacrifice, and horrendous loss, this gentle and sometimes sentimental story offered reassurance to readers of the time.