laid her hand in his. "Doctor Abernathy!" she acknowledged softly.
Something of the woman's malaise seemed communicated to him as the softness of her ringers lay against his palm. He felt a psychic current run through him, pervading heart and brain and body with a kindling glow. Strangely, unreasonably but resistlessly, he was drawn to her, knew that here he faced a riddle, unsolvable, perhaps, but one which he must puzzle over till solution came.
"Madame Foulik is Egyptian," he heard Conover explaining; "she must feel at home in this display, although her own Musée des Antiques" He waved a faintly deprecating hand. "Well, it must be pleasing to see things that take you back to home and childhood memories."
The woman looked past him, and her black-fringed, golden eyes seemed pleading, as for understanding sympathy, as they caught and held Abernathy's. "Everything about America takes me back to home and childhood, Doctor," she answered in an almost voiceless whisper; then, laying a light touch on Abernathy's arm: "My car is waiting outside. May I help you home?"
"Oh, no, thanks," Conover replied. "I'm on the committee—have to stay and mingle with the guests and all that sort o' thing, you know. Abernathy has no strings on him, though."
"Then I shall have the pleasure of your escort, Doctor?" In the European manner she laid her hand on Abernathy's cuff.
He eyed her covertly as the big Cadiliac slipped down the avenue, tires barely whispering against the asphalt. Despite the harmony produced in her by art and nature's blending—skilful make-up skilfully applied to perfect skin, a costume tuned to her complexion as the cello's strings are tuned to match the violins' tones in a great orchestra—she seemed strangely contradictory, enigmatic, and inharmonious. There was character a-plenty, and to spare, in small, firm chin; the kestrel nose might stand for cruelty or acquisitiveness, but the cleft that marked her chin and the luscious, full, red lips were soft and passionate and made for kissing, while the long, slim, lissome lines of her, the childishly small hands with tapering, fragile fingers, the tiny, narrow, high-arched feet, were almost fairy-like. Not very young, he guessed, yet certainly not old. Her chin and throat-line had a cameo-sharp clarity, her skin was rose-leaf smooth, her breasts full-blown, high-set and outward-pointing. She might have been in the late teens, the middle twenties or early thirties; he could not decide, but if she were maturely young, or if youth still persisted in maturity, one thing was certain: she drew him to her as no woman ever had. He could feel his pulses quicken and his breath come faster as she leaned toward him when the big car whisked round a curve and the subtle, spicy scent which she affected wafted to his nostrils.
Odd how perfumes resurrect dead memories, he mused. A whiff of honeysuckle blown through car windows as you drive alone at night, and the palimpsest of time is wiped clean of the overlay of years, and you're a high school junior once again, strolling through the shadowed streets with your first sweetheart . . . the scent of fresh-turned earth as you walk through the park, and once again perspective shortens, and you are on the farm in summer, with the plowshare tearing through the black, lush topsoil . . . that heady per-
