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then closed his eyes and kissed her again, and when he pulled slowly away, there were tears in her eyes and she was smiling as he hadnever seen her smile before and slowly, the smile broadening, she nodded.
    “Yes … I will ….”
    The wedding of Raphaella de Mornay-Malle y de Santos y Quadral and John Henry Phillips IV was of a magnitude seldom seen. It took place in Paris and there was a luncheon for two hundred on the day of the civil ceremony, a dinner for a hundred fifty family members and “intimate friends” that night, and a crowd of more than six hundred at Notre-Dame for the wedding the next day. Antoine had taken over the entire Polo Club and everyone agreed that both the wedding and the reception were the most beautiful they had ever seen. Remarkably they had also managed to strike up a bargain with the press so that if Raphaella and John Henry would pose for photographs for half an hour, and answer whatever questions arose, they would be left in peace after that.
    The wedding stories were featured in
Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily
, and the following week’s
Time
. Throughout the press interviews Raphaella had clutched John Henry’s hand almost desperately, and her eyes seemed larger and darker than ever before in the snow-white face.
    It was then that he vowed to keep her shielded in the future from the prying eyes of the press. He didn’t want her having to cope with anything that made her uncomfortable or unhappy. He was well aware of how carefully protected she had been during her early years. The problem was that John Henry was a man who attracted the attention of the press with alarming frequency, and when he took a bride forty-four yearshis junior, then his wife became an object of fascination too. Fortunes of the magnitude of John Henry’s were almost unheard of, and an eighteen-year-old girl, born of a marquesa and an illustrious French banker was almost too good to be true. It was all very much like a fairy tale, and no fairy tale was complete without a fairy princess. But thanks to John Henry’s efforts she remained sheltered. Together they maintained an anonymity no one would have thought possible over the years. Raphaella even managed to attend two years of school at the University of California in Berkeley and it went very smoothly. No one had any idea who she was during the entire two years. She even refused to be driven to Berkeley by the chauffeur, and John Henry bought her a little car that she drove to school.
    It was exciting, too, to be among the students and to have a secret and a man she adored. Because she did love John Henry, and he was gentle and loving in every way. He felt as though he had been given a gift so precious, he barely dared to touch it, so grateful was he for the new life he shared with this ravishingly beautiful, delicate young girl. In many ways she was childlike, and she trusted him with her entire soul. It was perhaps because of that that it was such a bitter disappointment to him when he discovered that he had become sterile presumably from a severe kidney infection he’d had ten years before. He knew how desperately she had wanted children and he felt the burden of guilt for depriving her of something she wanted so much. She insisted, when he told her, that it didn’t matter, that she had all the children at Santa Eugenia whom she could spoil and amuse and love. She loved to tell them stories and buy them presents.She kept endless lists of their birthdays and was always going downtown to send some fabulous new toy off to Spain.
    But even his failure to father children could not sever the bond that held them together over the years. It was a marriage in which she worshiped him and he adored her, and if the difference in their ages caused comment among others, it never bothered either of them. They played tennis together almost every morning, sometimes John Henry ran in the Presidio or along the beach and Raphaella ran along beside him, like a puppy dog at his