He seemed to understand. 'It will be again,' he told me. 'Next year. That's the wonderful thing about gardens, they always grow back.'

'I suppose so.' I sighed again. 'But I wish they wouldn't die.'

He was silent a moment, gazing down at his feet with a contemplative air, and then he kicked gently at a loose clod of earth, turning it over with the toe of his boot to expose its underbelly of tangled white roots.

'It's still there, you see,' he pointed out. 'Bulbs and roots, just waiting to grow. You have to learn to look with more than just your eyes, Julia.' He took a deep pull on the cigarette and exhaled, slowly. 'Try looking with your soul, instead. The soul sees what truly matters.'

For a long minute, nothing moved. Then he lifted his head and his eyes met mine across the stillness of the dead garden. Across the centuries. Behind us, in the house, the telephone began to ring, but I made no move to answer it. I went on staring at him, wordlessly, my heart rising in my throat.

'Could you not see it?' he asked me, gently. 'Christ, I'd have thought it was that obvious. Freda had to threaten violence, once or twice, to make me hold my tongue.'

My own voice came with difficulty. 'She knew?'

'Oh, aye. She knew the moment Geoff first brought me home from Cambridge. Hell of a time I had, that summer. I thought I must be going mad.... Well'—he smiled faintly, blowing smoke—'you know what it's like.'

'Yes.'

We might have been discussing the weather. He hadn't moved to touch me—he looked the same old Iain, leaning square against the dovecote wall, his hair turned copper by the setting sun that caught the stubborn angle of his jaw. Unhurried, he lifted the cigarette. 'Afterward, I went to Paris, worked for Morland. I was curious, about what Richard did in Paris, in his exile. I had some small adventures, over there, but all I really felt was loneliness, and of course, there was no you.'

'So you came back.' I almost whispered the words.

'Aye. I bought the cottage, settled in, and waited for you to turn up. I knew you would.'

His gaze slid sideways to mine, a glancing touch, then passed on to where the oak tree stood in shadows in the hollow. The telephone, forgotten, gave a final dying ring that faded softly into silence. I scarcely noticed.

'Why didn't you say anything?' I asked him.

'I wanted to.' This time the gray eyes didn't look away. 'Believe me, I wanted to. I've been to hell and back, this summer. But Freda said you'd get it right, in time, if I would only wait.'

'Iain ...'

'Ordinarily,' he went on, evenly, 'I'm a patient man. But I think I've waited long enough.' He pitched the cigarette away and came toward me with slow, deliberate steps. 'Time we both stopped waiting, and began to live.'

The tone, the stance, were briefly Richard's, but it was Iain who came to me, Iain who stood before me with his broad shoulders blocking out the light. How could I have been so blind, I wondered, not to have seen it long before? Everything I wanted, all that I had ever been or could ever hope to be, was there in those steady gray eyes.

For a long, aching minute he just stood there looking down at me, silent and serious. And in my eyes he saw his answer, for at last he smiled, and took my face in his strong hands, tracing my cheekbone with a delicate touch.

'These are your beautiful days, Julia Beckett,' he promised me softly. And as he lowered his head to mine and kissed me, a flock of starlings rose beating from the hollow in a shifting, glorious cloud, wheeled once against the blood-red sky, and then was gone.

The circle was closed.