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bones and retained the pink-and-white coloring of youth. Deep crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and mouth slashed upward, imparting an aura of perpetual good humor. The red warred with the silver in her curly hair.
    â€œWell, dear,” she said crisply, her voice splitting the darkness like a homing beacon, “Pierce is delighted that you’ve arrived. Without intervention, he would certainly have lost yet another hand of gin rummy. Soon he will owe me his salary unto all eternity and I shall have to collect debts from his grandchildren.”
    â€œWinning agrees with you; you look lovely.” Spraggue mounted the front steps and aimed a kiss at her offered cheek.
    â€œThey do say antiques are in vogue this season,” she said drily. As they entered the foyer, she stared at him critically and made a noise that in anyone less refined would have been a grunt.
    Spraggue lifted one eyebrow inquiringly.
    â€œYou have elm leaves in your hair, my dear,” she said. “Just bits and pieces of them, really. I am trying to deduce what revelry you could have indulged in that would cause a four-hour delay between the termination of your performance and your arrival at my front door replete with elm leaves. I am far too tactful to inquire, but even at my advanced age, I possess an active imagination.… What would you like to drink, and are you at all hungry after your evening’s whatever?”
    Spraggue let her take his arm and draw him into the library, his favorite room, unchanged since his boyhood, probably unchanged since his great-grandfather, robber-baron Davison Spraggue, had built the massive Georgian structure to the confounding of his enemies and to their secret admiration. The vast room was two stories high with a system of wrought-iron balconies and spiral staircases that enabled one to reach the towering bookshelves that covered three walls. The Oriental rug was a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot Kashan with plenty of parquet border surrounding it. One wall of books was broken up by a huge bay window that overlooked the front lawn as it swept down to the wading pool. The fourth wall was the focal point of the room: over the marble mantelpiece, skillfully lighted, hung the Cezanne landscape that was the pride of the Spraggue Post-Impressionist Collection.
    Mary made a beeline for her favorite chair, a green velvet wingback near the bay window. Spraggue sprawled on the matching sofa. Pierce, with a distinct air of relief, began collecting cards off the game table, melding them into a pack.
    â€œSee that?” Mary murmured softly. “Didn’t even ask me if I wanted to play out the hand. Imagine what rotten cards he must have had!” She shifted her focus abruptly to her nephew. “You look sleepy,” she said, as if the very idea of sleep at three in the morning was absurd. “Coffee to keep you awake or wine to further sedate you?”
    â€œNo coffee.”
    â€œWine, then. If you overindulge, you can sleep it off in the tower room.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œSeems a logical plan to me.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt is your room, in your house—”
    â€œAunt Mary, I don’t want breakfast in bed tomorrow. I don’t want all my clothes to mysteriously disappear during the night and turn up tomorrow morning washed, pressed, and brushed, with all the missing buttons sewn on. I want to go home and collapse on my unmade bed in my own disarray and wake up and find everything just where I left it.”
    â€œI’ll explain to Dora that you prefer to—”
    â€œWhy not get me drunk first and then try to persuade me to stay?”
    Her eyes accepted the challenge. She hesitated for perhaps five seconds, smiled sweetly, and said, “How long has it been since you’ve tasted any of your very own 1968 Holloway Hills Private Reserve Cabernet?”
    He smiled, recalling more than the rich, earthy taste of wine, remembering an entire