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corn-belt flatland. The escape from delicate life-or-death responsibility he’d wanted had been more complete than he’d bargained for. There was no responsibility so far. Nothing.
    Yet the flames had flickered again, threatened to blaze once more.
    Hugh Stewart sat down at his desk tiredly, rubbing hands through his hair. Ann Burley. He hadn’t counted on that at all.
    Yet he could think of nothing else. Her face was etched in his brain. It was the way she’d looked when, after he’d kissed her, she’d turned her face away from him, trembling…
    There had been no forewarning. Nothing of substance said between them. They had stood apart in that farmhouse. In Ted Burley’s farmhouse…
    But the unsaid, unadmitted communication was as real as though it could be seen, like spitting sparks along a high-tension line. They’d come together roughly. She’d met his fire-driven passion equally. Then they had stopped.
    He’d left swiftly and returned to his office. Now here he was as the darkness crept into an unlit room. The emptiness, the grimness, had returned.
    He was startled when the knock sounded on his door. He stood up, frowning. There were so few knocks at his door. He opened it, blinking in surprise.
    Ann Burley stood there, blond hair rumpled, wide-spaced brown eyes staring at him as through long distances and a hundred hurts. There was a bruise darkening her left cheek. Blood showed at the corner of her mouth.
    “May I come in?” she asked as though dazed.
    He helped her in quickly.

 
chapter seven
     
    Ann Burley had awakened that morning with a premonition of disaster.
    The day was like any other winter’s day on a farm outside Arrow Junction. The snow was falling, and a lot of snow fell on Arrow Junction in the winter of every year. The wind and cold and amount of snow were reaching blizzard proportions. But there had always been blizzards in Arrow Junction’s history. Snow, cold and wind. The flat barrenness of the country and the old, inadequate farmhouse. It was pretty much like any other winter’s day.
    But at midmorning, when she was alone in the small house, Ann had opened herself to a self-examination more intense than any she’d ever committed before. It was an effort to recheck the events that might have led her to this premonition of disaster.
    She had started in this world twenty-seven years ago, an only child of parents spread vastly in age. Her father was already middle-aged when she was born, her mother barely twenty. As she grew older her mother seemed to want to grow younger. But her father continued to want to ease into a restful twilight of old age. Her parents convivially separated when she was seventeen. Ann chose to distribute her affections equally by going away to school. Her father remained in Sacramento, her mother moved to Los Angeles.
    She spent two years at college in Santa Barbara. When she went to work in San Francisco at nineteen, she was extraordinarily pretty. She worked first in an insurance office on Sansome Street, then in an advertising agency on Montgomery Street.
    It was a smooth transition from girl to woman. There were impersonal visits with her father in Sacramento. The variance in their ages created a chasm, yet the relationship was always pleasant.
    The time with her mother was spent absorbing the gush of her mother’s emotion, her silliness, her attempted deception of time. She had begun to realize the foolishness of her mother.
    Yet Ann’s life was smooth. Her beauty saw to that. The male attendance was vast. She did not fall truly in love. The emotions she experienced were but infatuations which started quickly and ended just as quickly. She simply enjoyed life, a fast clear-running river of activity and work. That she might have viewed marriage with suspicion as the result of her own parents’ debacle did not consciously enter her mind.
    So went her existence. Until that chance moment when she’d walked along her street in the dusk and saw one man