"There's nothing any more, dear. It all ended long ago. Perhaps I'll be sad when I see him. But sad only for him." Meredith smiled and spoke with an effort at lightness. "Remember, I don't hold you to anything. I want you only to be happy. In your own way. Not in my way. And if it will mean happiness for you to ... for you to go back, why ..." He shrugged his shoulders and continued to smile with hurt eyes. "Eddy...." Her face came close to his. He hesitated until her arms closed tightly around him. He felt her warm lips cling and open. "You've never kissed like that before, Anna." There was almost a fear in his voice. "Because I never knew I wanted you," she whispered, "till now--till this minute; till you said about my going back." Her face was alive with emotion. A laugh, and she was in his arms again. They stood embraced, murmuring tenderly to each other. Later in her bedroom Anna undressed slowly. Her thoughts seemed to be quarreling with her emotions, her emotions with her thoughts. This was Erik's room--ancient torture chamber. Something still clinging to its walls and furniture. Ah, nights of agony still in the air she breathed. Her words formed themselves quietly. They came to peer into her heart--polite visitors standing on tiptoe before a closed cell that hid something. "Is there anything?" she murmured. "No. I'm different." She thought of the day she had come out of a grave and resumed living. It had seemed as if she must learn to walk again, to breathe, to discover anew the meanings of words. At first--listless, uncertain. Then new steps, new meanings. Her mind moved back through the year. She had wept only once--on the night of the divorce. But that was as one weeps at an old grave, even a stranger's grave. The rest had been Eddy. "I've changed. And I've been happier in many ways." She was talking to herself. Why? "I'm a different Anna." But why think of it? It was settled. She lay in the bed and her eyes opened at the darkness. Here was where she had lain when she had died. Each night, new deaths. Here the lonely darkness that had once choked her, torn at her eyes and made her scream aloud with pain. Things on the other side of a grave. Memories become alien. Things of long ago, when the whisper of the dark came like an insanity into her brain. "Erik gone! Erik gone! Gone!" A word that beat at her until she died--to awake in the morning and stumble once more through a day.