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That would be an easy way to make Willie happy—accept him, but that she could never do, not with her sins so heavy on her soul. She could not even bear to tell him the truth about little George—had told him the child who had died was “Georgette,”a nd even that name, once out of her mouth, had seemed too close to the truth.

“When I was small,”M aud began without preamble, “I repeatedly dreamed of a beautiful dark woman. She would bend over my cot and look at me. Her eyes were so sad they broke my heart.”

She spoke quickly, her inflection curiously flat. Willie stared at her, his ear quick to the difference in intensity between words and tone, but as she had known, the lure of something occult—and more than occult, information intimately linked to her—drove him to pursue the information rather than to query after her state of mind.

“A woman?”h e asked. “Old or young?”

“Neither,”Maud replied. “A woman grown, not a girl, but not an old woman yet.”

“Was this woman someone you knew? Your mother perhaps? I recall you saying your mother died when you were young.”

“No. It wasn’t my mother. I never saw this woman in life, though I looked for her among my mother’s friends and relations. Although I never found her, I felt curiously intimate with her—as if I knew her well.”

“This vision was of a modern person then?”

Maud thought Willie seemed disappointed. He did so love the exotic. It would have been more exciting for him had she dreamed of Joan of Arc in her armor or Deidre in her bridal robes. Maud called the image of the dark woman to her mind’s eye, unwilling, though she knew not why,merely to invent details.

“Not modern, no,”sh e said slowly. “The woman in my dream wore a grey dress, with grey veil covering the lower portion of her face. Over this veil I saw her eyes, large and dark brown, looking at me intently and with immense sorrow. Those eyes are what I remember most of all.”

“Ah . . . I wonder . . . What do you feel for this woman?”

“Pity, I think, and always a peculiar intimacy.”

Maud turned away, unable to bear any longer the keen, interested light that had come over Willie’s countenance, although she was the one who had sought to awaken him from his brooding. The curtains over the window she faced had not yet been drawn, and the glass cast back a reflection.

Two reflections, one laid over the other, so that the images were intermingled yet curiously distinct. Oddly, neither of the reflections contained Maud herself.

Behind her, Willie had raised his hand and was making several quick, elaborate gestures. Maud hardly registered his odd behavior, so overwhelmed was she by the other image—one she had at first taken as herself, only to realize that the woman reflected there was also the Lady in Grey.

In the reflected image, the black of Maud’s mourning had washed to dark grey. The eyes, so like Maud’s own in the misery they held, were darker and ringed with sleeplessness. What Maud had before taken for a veil was her own gloved hand, raised to her mouth in horrified recognition.

WILLIE

As Willie listened to Maud’s account of her childhood haunting by the Lady in Grey, he heard the strain in her voice. That tightness only grew worse as she sought to answer his simple questions. Intuitively, he knew that they were approaching one of the obstacles to the love he had felt should have been theirs from the very first moment of their meeting.

Overcome with her own emotions,Maud had turned away from him.Willie made up his mind with a swiftness that surprised him, for in all his studies of the occult he had always attempted to remain rational. Indeed, his rational desire to test magical theory was what had led to his expulsion from the Theosophical Society.What he was considering now was hardly the result of careful reasoning, but he felt it was right.

In his studies with the Order of the Golden Dawn, Willie had been indoctrinated into a wealth of magical lore. As surely as if he heard golden trumpets