There’s comfort in the idea that no matter how threatening the world sometimes seems right outside our doors, underneath all the uncertainty there must be an essential rightness to events, a pattern in the tapestry of life that we cannot discern while we’re living through the chaos. Only later – sometimes long after the fact – can we see the larger design.

And that message remains just as comforting eighty years later, in today’s unsettled and sometimes unnerving world.

Ghost story, love story, and one of the earliest paranormal romances of the modern era, Tryst is a book which speaks to readers of all ages with its gentle and reassuring philosophy that life has a pattern and true love cannot be denied.

Leigh Michaels

CHAPTER ONE

SABRINA had never picked a lock in her life, but it was done every day in books. She tiptoed along the carpeted upper passage and whisked round the corner to the second flight of stairs leading to the top floor of the house. Gripped tightly in one hand she carried her burglar tools—nail-scissors with curved points, a button-hook, and some wire hairpins stolen from Aunt Effie’s dressing-table.

She climbed the stairs stealthily, step by step, and the fine old oak never creaked once under her scant ninety pounds. Sabrina at seventeen had lost her baby fat, but had not yet begun, as Aunt Effie was fond of remarking, to fill out.

At the top of the stairs she stopped to listen, bending perilously double over the banisters. Not a sound from below. They would think she was reading in her room, which was only natural because it was raining. She was free, reasonably so, till tea time. With a long-drawn breath she faced the locked door, dropped to her knees in front of the keyhole, and set to work.

She bent the hairpins in various ways, patiently. She tried the button-hook from all angles. Then she tried both hairpin and button-hook together. Nothing happened at all, and the small scraping noises she made seemed to reverberate through the tranquil silence of the house. Just as she was about to give up, the hairpin caught and lodged. She exerted cautious pressure with the button-hook. Something gave. Something clicked. She had done it. The lock had turned.

She knelt there, staring at the door, wide-eyed and shaken. The first thing that occurred to her was that now she could never get it locked again. And then she didn’t care, for the knob had turned easily under her hand, and the door moved two inches inward. The crack went on widening before her fascinated gaze until, still kneeling, she beheld the forbidden room. With a quick glance be hind her at the empty stairs, she snatched up her tools and got to her feet—stepped across the threshold swiftly and closed the door, shutting herself inside.

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