A street lamp blinked to life, a car went by, a grimy urchin watched him impassively from a doorway across the road. He felt much alone.
He heard feet coming down the stairs, a woman's light quick tread. Expecting Maria Lombardi, he took off his hat and bowed in Continental style when the door opened. He stopped halfway through the gesture and remained staring.
Morna, he thought, and he stood on the schooner's deck as it heeled to the wind, and she was grasping the mainmast shrouds with one hand, crouched on the rail and shading her eyes across an ocean that glittered. Her yellow hair blew back into his face, it smelled of summer.
"Yes?"
Kintyre shook himself, like a dog come out of a deep hurried river. "I'm sorry," he stammered. "I'm sorry. You startled me, looked like someone I used to—" He pulled the chilly twilight air into his lungs, until he could almost feel them stretch. One by one, his muscles relaxed.
"Miss Lombardi, isn't it?" he tried again. "I haven't seen you for a couple of years, and you wore your hair differently then. I'm Robert Kintyre."
"Oh, yes. I remember you well," she said. Her mouth turned a little upward, its tautness gentling. "Bruce's professor. He spoke of you so often. It's very kind of you to come."
She stood aside to let him precede her. His hand brushed hers accidentally in the narrow entrance. Halfway up the stairs, he realized he was holding the fist clenched.
What is this farce? he asked himself angrily. Nothing more than straight blonde hair, worn in bangs across the forehead and falling to the shoulders. Now in the full electric light he could see that it wasn't even the same hue, a good deal darker than Morna's weather-bleached mane. And Corinna Lombardi was a mature woman—young, he recalled Bruce's going over to the City last month for her twenty-second birthday party—but grown. Morna would always be thirteen.
Corinna had been nineteen when he saw her last, still living here and working in the café. That was at a little farewell dinner the Lombardis had given him, before he departed for his latest year in Italy. They had wanted him to look up Angelo's brother Luigi, the one who had made a success in the old country as a secret service man. Kintyre had visited Luigi a few times, finding him a pleasant sort with scholarly inclinations, most interested in his brilliant nephew Bruce, with whom he corresponded.