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The war lapped around her, but she could not feel it Her eyes atching the slow progress of the two-car cavalcade driving away, doards the lodge gates

Princess Fati

But not without leaving behind a gift that was priceless to Diana

A gift she had immediately, instantly demurred over

‘Highness, I cannot! It is impossible I cannot accept’

An imperious raised hand had been her answer ‘To refuse would be to offend,’ the Princess had said But then her other hand had touched the back of Diana’s ‘Please’ she’d said, her voice soft

So, with a gratitude she had been able to express only falteringly, Diana had taken the Princess’s gift And now, as she watched her uninvited but oh-so-kind guest take her leave, the saratitude filled her

The black cars disappeared down the long avenue and Diana went back indoors Went into the estate room—her office—sat down at the desk and withdrew her chequebook With a shaky hand she wrote out the cheque she had longed with all her being to be able to write for somonths

The cheque that would set her free

Free of the one man in the world she could never be free of

However much money she repaid him

Nikos sat in his seat on the jet, curving through the airspace that divided France froland He stared out over the broken cloudscape beyond the , his thoughts full Emotions fuller

She had been so frail, that woman in the hospital bed So slender, so petite, it had hardly seeiven birth at all—let alone to the two grown sons now standing at the foot of her bed The son she had chosen over her baby, who had now brought that lost child back to her And the son who had hated her all his life

Who could hate her no longer

Her eyes had filled with tears when they had gone to him Silent tears that had run down her thin cheeks so that her older son had started forward, only to be held at bay by the veined hand raised to him Nikos’s half-brother had halted, and she had lifted her other hand with difficulty, lifted it entreatingly, towards the son she had abandoned Rejected