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heels, laughing and teasing and sometimes just walking along in silence afterward, holding his hand. Her life was filled with John Henry, her studies, and her letters to her family in Paris and Spain. She led a very protected, old-fashioned existence, and she was a happy woman, truly more of a happy girl, until she was twenty-five.
    Two days before John Henry’s sixty-ninth birthday he was to fly to Chicago to close a major deal. He had been talking about retiring for several years now, but like her father, there was no real end in sight. He had too much passion for the world of high finance, for the running of banks, the acquiring of new corporations, and the buying and selling of huge blocks of stock. He loved putting together mammoth real-estate deals like the first one he had done with her father. Retirement just wasn’t for him. But when he left for Chicago he had a headache, and despite the pills Raphaella had pressed on him that morning, the headache had grown steadily worse.
    In terror his assistant had chartered a plane andflown back with him from Chicago that evening, arriving with John Henry barely conscious. Raphaella looked down into the pale gray face as they brought him off the plane on a stretcher. He was in so much pain, he could barely speak to her, yet he pressed her hand several times on their way to the hospital in the ambulance, and as she looked at him in terror and despair, fighting back the tears that had clogged her throat, she suddenly noticed something odd about his mouth. An hour later his face looked strangely distorted, and shortly thereafter he fell into a coma from which he did not rouse for several days. John Henry Phillips had had a stroke, it was explained on the news that evening. It was his office that had prepared the press release, keeping Raphaella, as always, from the prying eyes of the news.
    John Henry stayed in the hospital for almost four months and had two more smaller strokes before he left. When they brought him home, he had permanently lost the use of his right arm and leg, the youthful handsome face sagged pitifully on one side, and the aura of strength and power was gone. John Henry Phillips was suddenly an old man. He was broken in body and spirit from that moment, yet for another seven years his life had dwindled on.
    He never left his home again. The nurse wheeled him into the garden for some sunshine and Raphaella sat with him for hours at a time, but his mind wasn’t always clear anymore, and his life, once so vital, so busy, so full, had changed radically. There was nothing more than a shell of the man left. And it was this shell that Raphaella lived with, faithfully, devotedly, lovingly, reading to him, talking to him, comforting him. As the nurses who tended him around the clockcared for the broken body, she attempted to console the spirit. But his spirit was broken, and at times she wondered if hers was as well. It had been seven years since the first series of strokes. There had been two more strokes since, which had reduced him still further, until he was unable to do much more than sit in his wheelchair, and most of the time he stared into space, thinking back to what was no more. He was still able to speak, though with difficulty, but much of the time he seemed to have nothing more to say. It was a cruel joke that a man who had been so alive should be rendered so small and so useless. When Antoine had flown over from Paris to see him, he had left John Henry’s room with tears streaming unashamedly down his cheeks, and his words to his daughter had been quite clear. She was to stand by this man who had loved her and whom she had loved and married, until he died. There was to be no nonsense, no whimpering, no shrinking from her duties, no complaining. Her duty was clear. And so it had remained, and Raphaella had not shrunk or whispered or complained for seven long years.
    Her only respite from the grim reality of her existence was when she traveled to Spain in