No, not hate, just loathe._

He glanced at the watch on his wrist, a Waltham he had long since lost
or broken or given away--he couldn't recall which. He said, "All the
same, mother, a date's a date. I'm a little late now. Don't wait up for
me."

"I shan't," she replied, looking after him with a frown of pale concern
as he headed for the hall closet.

It took a few minutes to get the Pontiac warmed up but once out of the
driveway Coulter knew the way to Eve Lawton's house as if he had been
there last night, not two decades earlier. The small cold winter moon
cast its frigid light over an intimate little group of apple tapioca
clouds and made the snow-clad fields a dark grey beneath the black
evergreens that backed the fields beside the road.

As he slowed to a stop in front of the old white-frame house with its
graceful utilitarian lines of roof and gable, he found himself wondering
whether this were the dream or the other--the twenty years that had
found him an orphan. That had given him enough inherited money to strike
out for himself in New York. That had seen him win success as a
highly-paid publicist. That had seen him married to wealthy Connie
Marlin and a way of life as far from that of Lincolnville as he himself
now was from Scarborough and Connie.

* * * * *

Eve opened the door before he reached it. She was as willowy and alive
as he remembered her, and a great deal more vital and beautiful. She put
up her face to be kissed as soon as he was inside and his arms went
around her soft angora sweater and he wondered a little at what he had
so cavalierly dismissed and left behind him.

She said, "You're late, Banning. I thought you'd forgotten."

He kept one arm around her as they walked into the living room with its
blazing fire. He said, "Sorry. Mother wanted to talk."

"Is she terribly worried about me?" Eve asked. Her face, in inquiry, was
like a half-opened rose.

Coulter hesitated, then replied, "I think so, darling. She was afraid
your stock had gone to seed. I had to remind her that your great, great,
great grandfather outranked mine."

The odd, in her case beautiful, blankness of fear smoothed Eve's
forehead. She said, her voice low, her eyes not meeting his, "Yesterday
you'd never have noticed what she was thinking."

"Yesterday?" He forced her to look at him. "Yesterday I was another
man--a whole twenty-four hours younger." He added the last hastily, so
as no