Just between the two of us, I don’t feel it. Kate looked at him in momentary confusion, then her brow cleared. He reached her side, and she made room for him on the seat beside her. My great-grandson will take over Kruger-Brent Limited one day. Kate watched with pleasure as Robert threaded his way through the dancers. As though sensing her eyes on him, Robert turned, and Kate beckoned him to her with a wave of her fingers, the perfect twenty-carat diamond her father had scooped up on a sandy beach almost a hundred years ago scintillating in the radiance of the crystal chandelier. Robert was a replica of his great-great-grandfather, Jamie McGregor, the man in the painting above the marble fireplace. He was a strikingly handsome boy, almost eight years old, fair-haired, dressed in a black velvet jacket and tartan trousers. He was standing near the orchestra, watching the musicians. Kate’s eyes searched the large room until she saw him. And she wished David could have lived to know his great-grandson. And there was her David, dear David, looking tall and young and handsome, the way he looked when she first fell in love with him, and he was smiling at her, and she thought, Soon, my darling, soon. She saw Banda, his proud black face beaming. They were a part of those years, a part of my life. Where have all the years gone? She watched the dancing ghosts. I don’t feel ninety, Kate Blackwell thought. She had fine, white hair that once had been a luxuriant black cascade, and against the graceful folds of her ivory velvet dress, her skin had the soft translucence old age sometimes brings. A proud bone structure, dawn-gray eyes and a stubborn chin, a blending of her Scottish and Dutch ancestors. She was a slim, petite woman, with a regal bearing that made her appear taller than she was. Not counting the ghosts, Kate Blackwell thought wryly.

There were one hundred people at the party at Cedar Hill House, in Dark Harbor, Maine. Kate Blackwell watched them mingle with the flesh-and-blood people, and in her mind, the scene was a dreamlike fantasy as the visitors from another time and place glided around the dance floor with the unsuspecting guests in black tie and long, shimmering evening gowns. The large ballroom was crowded with familiar ghosts come to help celebrate her birthday.

Sidney sheldon books master of the game