Demon Child

was nearly prepared for sleep, someone knocked softly on her door. She knew it wasn't Cora when the knock came the third time, for Cora would have let herself in after a second knock.
        Slipping on a robe over her pajamas, she opened the portal just a crack and looked at Walter Hobarth. He was smoking a pipe; the tobacco smelled like cherries, pleasant and not at all as obnoxious as most kinds of smoke were.
        “I didn't wake you?” he asked solicitously.
        “No. Not at all,” she said.
        “I saw how interested you were in psychiatric techniques at dinner,” he said. “It just occurred to me that you might enjoy sitting in on tomorrow's session with Freya.”
        “Really?” she asked. The prospect excited her, partly because it showed he trusted her.
        “Really,” he said, smiling.
        “Won't that put Freya off-to have an outsider there?”
        “Not at all. She'll be hypnotized for the main part of the session.”
        “Well, if you're sure-”
        “I'm sure,” he said. “One o'clock, in the library tomorrow? I find the library better suited than a bedroom, because it has less the connotation of sickness. Scares the child less.”
        “One o'clock,” she said. “I'll be there.”
        “Good,” he said. “Pleasant dreams.”
        Then he turned and walked down the corridor towards his own room.
        She closed the door and threw the lock on it, out of habit, feeling as if she had just had some of Harold's brandy. Add one more credit to the day's list. This was a definite sign that Walter was more interested in her than mere good manners said he should be.
        She sat on the bed, not at all ready for sleep now. She had more thinking to do. It was time, she supposed, to face her feelings about the young psychiatrist.
        She had heard and read a great deal about love, of course. It was everyone's favorite subject. Great love stories made the bestseller list. Love songs were always in the top ten. But she had never, before this moment, experienced anything that she thought might be the equivalent of what those novelists wrote about, of what those musicians composed.
        Oh, yes, she had loved her parents and Grandmother Brighton. To a smaller degree, she loved Cora and Richard. But that was another sort of love from this one. Not a lesser love, merely a different kind.
        Then, like the stab of a dagger, she remembered where those other loves had ended. In death. And just because this was a different sort of love did not mean it would be terminated any differently.
        She refused to indulge herself in more romanticism.
        She finished preparing for bed, cooling her enthusiasm with a list of things that might possibly happen to shatter any dreams she had started to build. Pessimism had always been her byword. Now was not the time to change.
        Still, the invitation to tomorrow's session was a credit.
        She could not deny that.
        Before she turned off the lights (all but the tiny nightlight which glowed until morning) she went to the windows to draw the drapes tight across the glass. Harold always pulled them back in the morning and replaced the restraining golden cord. She made a note to tell him that was unnecessary.
        As she let the first panel of velvet down, she froze, her heart beating quicker in her breast, her palms suddenly cold and damp. Out there, on the late night lawn, a man was sneaking along a row of hedges leading from the house to the stables, trying his best to conceal himself.
        She eased herself behind the unfurled drape so that she could watch without being seen.
        He was moving away from the house, not toward it. He took his time passing through the deepest areas of shadow, but he scurried quickly through those patches where the estate's pole lights cast some illumination. Just ahead of him, there was a wide expanse of rather brilliantly lighted ground. When he came to that, he walked briskly across it, his shoulders hunched, his head hung between them.
        It was Richard.
        She watched him steal to the stables until he was out of sight. She stood there for fifteen minutes, hoping she would see him return and perhaps shed some clue on his strange behavior. But he did not come back.
        Why had he been so furtive? The stables belonged to him. He could certainly walk openly to them if he wished.
        She waited another twenty