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‘I’ll—do what I can.’ Reluctantly she turned away. ‘Will you send for me if—if anything happens?’

‘I will send for you,’ he promised kindly. ‘It may be a long job, Anna, or we could get them both out without difficulty. I have much experience of such accidents. Trust me.’

Of course, she trusted him! What else could she do when the pain in her heart was so intense, tearing her apart? The two people she loved most in all the world were down there at the mercy of the past where a stone pillar from a bygone age might fall across them, killing them immediately. She had no doubt now that Hugh Zacharakis had stumbled upon an ancient settlement close to the shore or an isolated homestead disturbed by the excavations he had made for her ambitious swimming-pool.

The two people she loved most in all the world
! The poignant words haunted her as she ran back along the terrace and on to the arched loggia where guests and staff had gathered since the arrival of the ambulance at the main door. How long had it taken her to realise that she was in love with Andreas—that she had always been in love with him?

While he, in his turn, was in love with Lara!

She took Lara’s daughter in her arms as the little girl ran towards her, kissing her cheek.

‘Everything will be all right, Martha,’ she soothed her. ‘Your mother will soon be here.’

There was a confusion of questions as the guests gathered round, offers of help and advice which she didn’t really hear.

‘Don’t go down there,’ she pleaded. ‘You could risk your life.’

That’s what Andreas was doing—Andreas and Hugh Zacharakis and the doctor. They were putting themselves in danger to bring her mother out alive. Her heart turned over at the thought.

‘What can we do here?’ someone asked.

Instantly she was calm, issuing directions, finding a spare room in case anyone else should be hurt in the rescue attempt, sending Paris to the Crescent Beach to try to locate Martha’s mother or even Susan, who must be somewhere around.

Susan came running across the sand, excusing herself as usual. ‘I thought, when she was visiting your mother, I could just read for a while,’ she said, ‘and I had some washing to do.’

Or someone to meet, Anna thought, but without bitterness.

‘Where is Mrs Warrender?’ she demanded. ‘Is she in the hotel?’

‘She’s at a meeting.’ Susan paused on the loggia, breathless. ‘It was something quite important and she wasn’t to be disturbed—something to do with the hotel.’

‘Go back and find her,’ Anna said, ‘Tell her Martha is safe but I’m keeping her over here till Doctor Ioannu can see her.’

‘And—your mother?’

‘We don’t know.’ Anna looked towards the canvas screen the contractor had erected to keep the dust from drifting across the loggia. ‘Andreas is down there, helping to get her out.’

‘Andreas?’ Susan murmured. ‘Oh, my God! Are they in danger? Mrs Warrender will never forgive me. It isn’t only Martha now.’

‘You tell her,’ Anna said firmly.

Lara would come, standing where she had stood a moment ago looking down into the dark crater where her love might have ended, Lara whose eyes were already saddened by memories of the past.

When Susan had gone she went to comfort Martha, but the child was already asleep, wrapped in blankets on one of the settees in the private sitting-room with a hint of a smile on her lips like the sleeping Eros of Paphos, her short golden curls tossed on the pillow Elli had placed beneath her head.

No need to wait beside her, Anna thought. Martha was safe until Lara came to claim her daughter.

Running, she made her way back to the scene of the excavations where the ambulance men were waiting with stretchers and first-aid. Two stretchers, she noticed, shivering.

‘They’re getting them out,’ Paris said. ‘We thought Andreas might be trapped when some more stone fell, but it is not so. He is able to speak to the doctor.’

Anna pressed forward without answering him.

‘You mustn’t go too near,’ Paris cautioned. ‘The earth just seems to slip away.’

Slowly, almost effortlessly, it seemed, men were reaching down to receive a burden while one of the stretchers was passed along to them. She saw the doctor’s head and shoulders appear above the cavity and then Andreas, covered in white dust, as if in a shroud.

She could not go to him; she could not help in any way because of the danger of falling rubble, but he looked directly at her as he was helped out, willing her the courage she could not find for herself. When he reached her she was trembling.

‘It’s all right, we’ve got her out,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s unconscious but she’s alive.’

Anna clung to him, unable to voice her relief and the tremendous debt she owed him while he held her for a moment with the same tenderness he had shown once before, which was surely compassion. He knew how she felt about her mother, and by the tightness of his jaw and the look in his eyes she knew that he felt the same. For a fleeting instant he was the old Andreas she had loved in the past and still loved.

The ambulance men were bringing her mother out, laying her carefully on the stretcher with a red blanket over her while the doctor took her pulse. Curiously enough, it was the vivid colour of the blanket which held Anna’s attention—red, like blood.

Andreas’ arm was still firmly about her shoulders. ‘They will take her to the hospital,’ he said. ‘It is the best thing to do. She is still unconscious.’

‘You saved her life.’ She scarcely heard her own words of gratitude. ‘We will always remember that.’

‘Someone else would have done it if I hadn’t, ‘he said. ‘All we must think of now is Mama.’

Frail and heartrendingly pale in the bright sunlight, her mother was carried past her.

‘I must go with her. Surely they will let me go in the ambulance?’ she said, freeing herself at last.

‘Doctor Ioannu will arrange everything,’ he told her, ‘and if it isn’t possible, Anna, I will take you.’

She said, ‘You must look after Martha till her mother gets here. She’s asleep in the little sitting-room.’

‘Which is the best thing that could have happened.’ His mouth was suddenly grim. ‘Thank you for taking care of her, Anna. She is very precious.’

They followed the stretcher round the gable end of the villa, through the rose garden Dorothy had tended lovingly for most of her married life, to the waiting ambulance at the front door. The doctor was already there.

‘You can go with her.’ He had answered her question before it was asked. ‘She may regain consciousness on the way.’

As the stretcher was slid carefully inside, a woman in a pale dress ran through the entrance gates. It was Lara in search of her daughter. Andreas went immediately to her side and she flung both arms about his neck in heartfelt gratitude.

‘Andreas, my dear, how will I ever repay you!’ she cried. ‘You have saved my child and you know how much she means to me.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ he said. ‘She was rescued before I got there—by the workmen—and she is now at the villa, safe and sound.’

Lara’s eyes remained steady on his for a long, intimate moment while Anna stumbled into the ambulance to sit down on the seat beside the stretcher, her own eyes suddenly dimmed with tears.

There was a vagueness about the next two hours which made nothing of time. Once her mother was safely in the white hospital bed and had opened her eyes in full consciousness to smile at her the world seemed to revolve again, although time had no place in it.

‘It was a silly thing to do,’ Dorothy whispered. ‘We were standing too near to the edge and when the little one slipped I had to get her.’ She gazed anxiously round the white-walled room. ‘Is she here?’

‘She is fast asleep at the villa or—or with her mother and Andreas at the Crescent Beach.’

‘Andreas got me out. I thought I heard him say that Martha wasn’t hurt just before everything turned black for me.' Dorothy moved her head uncertainly, looking towards the door. ‘Do you think he will come?'

‘Of course he will,’ Anna assured her, ‘but now you must get some sleep. I’ll stay with you.’

Dorothy smiled. ‘You are all very good to me. Do you think I have broken something?’ she added drowsily. ‘My back feels very—fragile.’

It was an old family joke, uttered poignantly at this time of crisis. They had all felt ‘fragile’ in the past when they didn’t want to do something in particular.

‘You will soon be well,’ was all Anna could say as she took the thin hand in hers and prepared to wait.

She sat in an ante-room just outside the ward door while two consultants conferred with Doctor Ioannu and presently the old family doctor came to reassure her. Her mother had escaped serious injury, although three of her ribs had been crushed by falling stone.

‘We will keep her here for a couple of weeks,’ he decided. ‘She’s very frail, Anna, and the rest will do her good. I have to be honest and say that I think the hotel is too much for her and she does not take kindly to the heat of summer down here on the coast. Ideally, she should be able to go into the mountains during the summer months, at least.’

It was something Anna had realised for a long time, something she would dearly have loved to do for the woman who had cared for her all her life, but circumstances had been against her. Now, when it was so important, she would have to think of some way to carry out Doctor Ioannu’s advice.

It grew dark as she listened for the sound of a car bringing Andreas to her mother’s bedside, although he had not made her such a promise. He had offered to take her to the hospital if she could not go in the ambulance, but that was all.

When he came she was ready to leave and her mother was asleep.

‘Best to leave her,’ she said. ‘She needs sleep more than anything else. She had three crushed ribs, but the doctors have strapped her up and she is now comfortable. I think—if you wanted to look in at her—they would let you.’

He held out his hand. ‘We’ll go together,’ he said.

Standing by her mother’s bedside with Andreas it seemed as if the years had rolled away and they were boy and girl together again. Time, which had parted them, stood aside and there was only the joy of sharing in her heart. That it was too late now did not occur to her for a moment as he pressed her hand in sympathy.

‘We must talk about this when we get back to the villa,’ he said quietly. ‘We have a decision to make.’

We? She would have bridled at the word twenty-four hours ago, but now it seemed only natural that Andreas should make decisions for them, at least where her mother was concerned. Tall and purposeful, he was taking the situation into his own hands because, for a moment, he had seen her weakness and recognised her need.

He drove her back to the villa where the contractor’s men were still clearing up the debris at the swimming- pool, working under floodlights which they had erected at the terrace edge.

‘You know that this will mean the end of your pool,’ he said as they stood on the loggia to watch. ‘The cave-in will have to be reported—Hugh Zacharakis will do that as the contractor—and the authorities will step in to see what further excavation reveals.’

‘What do you think they will find?’ she asked anxiously.

He shrugged. ‘Some Roman remains, I expect. They were here for three hundred years, remember.’

Anna drew in a deep breath. ‘It would be futile to argue,’ she agreed in some dismay. ‘What do the authorities do in a case like this?’

‘They wouldn’t pull down the villa, you can rest assured about that. Half the island is built on old foundations and we might only have found an ancient tomb, but they’ll want to dig for artefacts to make quite sure. My guess is a villa of some sort when it is so close beside the sea.’ He stood looking at her, his gaze thoughtful for a moment. ‘It could make a difference, Anna, either way. If it is a large find it could attract tourists; if it is only a segregated tomb it would be walled round and preserved, with an access to the public and that would be all.’

‘What are you hoping for?’ she asked.

‘A few bronze coins with an emperor’s head on one side and a temple of Aphrodite on the reverse. It happens all the time,’ he declared lightly.

‘It could mean the end of the Villa Severus as we know it,’ she pointed out.

‘I don’t think so.’ He took her by the arm. ‘And if it did it needn’t be the end of the world as far as you are concerned.’

She felt a hard lump rising in her throat. ‘It’s been my home for as long as I can remember,’ she reminded him. ‘All I’ve ever dreamed about could have happened within these walls, but—but I don’t suppose you can understand that.’

He gripped her by the shoulders, turning her to face the light. ‘Sometimes we have to make adjustments,’ he said briefly, ‘and not always in the way we would like. I hope you can keep the villa, but you may have to give up the idea of expanding it as an hotel. It’s in the lap of the gods, isn’t it?’ he added with a faint smile.

She thought about Lara and the child they both cherished. ‘Lara will have taken Martha back to the Crescent Beach,’ she said, ‘and you must want to go. I won’t keep you.’

He looked beyond her to the small group of holidaymakers gathering for drinks before dinner at the terrace bar.

‘Things seem to be going smoothly enough,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll see you in the morning in case you need my help. At least I could stand in for you while you visit the hospital.’ She held out her hand. ‘How can I thank you, Andreas?’ she asked. ‘How can I ever repay you for all you have done?’

He smiled crookedly, raising her fingers to his lips in a gesture of mock gallantry. ‘I did it for Mama,’ he said. ‘Not for you, Anna.’

He walked away along the loggia and down the terrace steps while she stood watching in the starlight, tall, loose- limbed and attractive, the only man she had ever truly loved. There was no resentment in her heart now, only a great emptiness when she thought of the way ahead, of all the days and all the years when she would remember him walking away like this, out of her life for ever, perhaps. It was hard to accept the inevitable, but she knew that he had changed.

Nikos came hot on the heels of Andreas’ leaving. ‘I heard about the accident in Limassol,’ he said, kissing her on both cheeks ‘What happened?’