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with whom she was ill at ease? Could she actually be as much in love with Ryerson as he believed?

Then why on earth would she have shot Lovat? Had Pitt missed something critical in Alexandria after all?

Narraway was watching him. He said abruptly, "What is it, Pitt?" He was leaning forward. His hand was shaking slightly.

Pitt was intensely aware of currents of emotion far beyond the facts he could see. He hated working with a superior who obviously trusted him so little, whatever the reason. Was it for his safety? Or someone else's? Or was Narraway protecting something in himself that Pitt could not even guess at?

"Nothing that seems to have any relevance to Lovat, or to Ryerson," he answered the question. "She was a passionate follower of one of the Orabi revolutionists, an older man. She fell in love with him, and he betrayed both her and the cause. It was a bitter hurt to bear."

Narraway drew in a long, deep breath and let it out silently. "Yes." The single word was all he said.

For seconds Pitt waited, sure Narraway would say more. There seemed to be sentences, paragraphs in his mind, just beyond reach.

But when he did speak, it was a change of subject. "What about Lovat?" he asked. "Did you find anyone who knew him? There must be something more than the written records we have here. For God's sake, what were you doing in Alexandria all that time?"

Pitt swallowed his irritation and told him briefly what he had done, his further pursuit of Edwin Lovat and his army career in Egypt, and Narraway listened, again in silence. It was unnerving. Some response would have made it easier.

"I couldn't find anything at all to suggest a motive for murder," Pitt finished. "He seemed a very ordinary soldier, competent, but not brilliant, a decent enough man who made no particular enemies."

"And his invaliding out?" Narraway asked.

"Fever," Pitt replied. "Malaria, as far as I could tell. He certainly was not the only one to get it at that time. There doesn't seem to have been anything remarkable about it. He was sent back to England, but honorably. No question over his record or his career."

"I know that much," Narraway said wearily. "His trouble seems to have begun after he got back home."

"Trouble?" Pitt prompted.

Narraway's look was sour. "I thought you looked at the man yourself?"

"I did," Pitt replied tartly. "If you remember, I told you." He was conscious of how tired he was. His eyes stung with the effort of keeping them open, and his body ached from long sitting in one position on the train. He was cold in spite of the fire in Narraway's office. Perhaps hunger and exhaustion added to it. He wanted to go home, to see Charlotte and hold her in his arms; he wanted these things so profoundly it required a deep effort to be civil to Narraway. "He's given plenty of men, and women, cause to hate him," he went on brusquely. "But we have nothing to suggest any of them were in Eden Lodge the night he was killed. Or have you discovered something?"

Narraway's face pinched tight. Pitt was startled by the sense of power in it. Narraway was not a large man, yet his mind and his emotion dominated the room, and would have, however many people had been there. For the first time Pitt realized how little he knew about a man in whose hands he placed his own future, even at times perhaps his life. He had no idea of Narraway's family or where he came from, and that did not matter. He had never known those things about Micah Drummond, or John Cornwallis, and he had not cared. He knew what they believed in, what mattered to them, and he understood them, at times better than they understood themselves. But then he was wiser, more experienced in human nature than they, who had seen only their own narrow portion of it.

Narraway was a far cleverer man, subtler. He never intentionally gave away anything of himself. Secrecy, misleading, taking knowledge without giving it, were his profession. But being obliged to trust where he could not see was a new experience for Pitt, and not a comfortable one.

"Have you?" he repeated. This time it was a challenge.

For a moment they faced each other in a silent, level stare. Pitt was not sure he could afford a confrontation, but he was too tired to be careful.

Narraway spoke very steadily, as