In the Still of the Night Read Online Free PDF

absorbed, too overwhelmed by the sudden presence of one another. But when he reached out and touched her hand where it lay on the back of a chapel chair, she withdrew it, and slowly looked around toward a wood carving of mother and child. Beyond the sculpture she could see the hall from which they had come and the people passing there.
    “No guilt?” he said in light mockery.
    “None,” she said, tossing her head in defiance of God knows whom.
    “Shall we sit down? You can lecture me on whatever that window’s all about.”
    “The passion of St. Vincent of Saragossa.”
    “The passion—a word with many meanings,” he said, moving a chair to make more room between it and the next one.
    “Let’s not sit down,” she said.
    “I understand.” Then: “Couldn’t sit on these chairs anyway. They’re built for midgets.”
    “There are not many men as tall as you in the countries where you find them.”
    “Or women as beautiful as you?”
    “That is a non sequitur, Father Morrissey.”
    He nodded gravely. They moved beyond the altar-like table supporting a marble bas-relief. When they stood behind it, beneath the St. Vincent window, they could hold hands unobserved from outside the chapel. She squeezed his fiercely and then let go of it. A silence fell between them. She broke it presently to say, “Oh, Dan, what’s to become of us?” She again laughed softly at herself, the hackneyed melodrama of her words.
    “Before we’re old and gray, priests will marry,” he said.
    “Divorced women?”
    “Mmmmm. I have a way of forgetting about your husband.”
    “So do I when I’m with you.”
    From the chapel entry a guard spoke. “Step back, please.”
    Startled, they leapt apart.
    “You are not allowed so close.” The guard gestured them back to make clear his meaning. His accent was Hispanic.
    “We are not touching anything,” the priest said, speaking in Spanish. It was a language in which he was almost fluent. He was not recognizable as a priest; he wore a sports jacket and turtleneck sweater.
    “It is my responsibility to say,” the guard said aggressively, perhaps because he had been addressed in Spanish, calling attention to his accent.
    “Let’s go, for heaven’s sake,” Kate said. “I want to see the modern glass.”
    The guard stood his ground while they walked past him, Kate holding high a very heavy head. “We’ve been drummed out of paradise.” There was not much mirth in the laugh she managed.
    “That guy’s a bully,” Morrissey said.
    Kate had it on the tip of her tongue to say that bullies chose their prey carefully. She held her peace and once out of the Sculpture Court felt some restoration of her pride. She ought to have learned, living twenty years with Martin Knowles, how to ignore the tyranny of servants, public or personal. Instead, in a restaurant, for example, where Martin insisted that the service be impeccable, she sympathized with the underdog waiter, however truculently he came to heel. She glanced up at Morrissey. He winked at her and she almost took his hand to swing along with him in the carefree manner of young lovers.
    At the heavy glass doors to the Garden Court an odd thing happened: as Kate pushed through, she caught the reflection of a man’s face in the glass. His eyes were on hers, sad, questing eyes. She thought she recognized him, but as the glass receded with the door’s opening, the image vanished, and when, having passed through, she looked back, there was no one in sight except Morrissey following close behind her.
    “The strangest thing,” she said. “I saw a face in the glass door, someone I thought I knew, but now it’s gone.”
    “That was me,” Morrissey said.
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Kate, shall we go on to your house and skip the art course?”
    “It’s too early,” she said. “We need to give my housekeeper a little more time to get away.”
    Katherine and Martin Knowles had been active members of St. Ambrose parish since