"They're wonderful notes," she said. "So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh." "Yes, but how are they signed?" She hesitated. "Never anything but 'Your Lover.'" "And so when you first saw me, you thought--" He began, then stopped because she was blushing. "How long have you been getting them?" "Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast." "But how does this--person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?" "I'm not sure." "But how can they get them in winter?" "I don't know." "Look here," he said, pouring himself more lemonade, "how long is it since you've been to the mainland?" "Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war." "What war?" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade. "The World War, of course. What's the matter?" Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint _chop-chop_ of the waves. And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read: HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones: Foes of Machado Riot in Havana Big NRA Parade Planned Balbo Speaks in New York * * * * * Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged. "Why are you so interested in old newspapers?" he asked. "I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old," the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933. "You're trying to joke," Jack told her. "No, I'm not." "But it's 1953." "Now it's you who are joking." "But the paper's yellow." "The paper's always yellow." He laughed uneasily. "Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied," he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. "Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or--" "Stop!" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced. "I don't like what you're saying." "But--" "No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here." "I'm really not joking," he said after a moment. She grew quite frantic at that. "I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!"