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‘He must have been a very masterful man!' Mrs Walsh decided. ‘Making sure everyone obeyed him and winning battles everywhere he went. It was all so very long ago,’ she mused, ‘but things haven’t changed all that much, with nations squabbling and fighting for no very good reason and powerful men getting their own way all the time.’ She gazed up at the castle walls. ‘Maybe Berengaria didn’t want to marry him too much at first, but it doesn’t seem to me that she had a lot of choice if he kept her here.’

The younger Miss Crabtree had been studying her book but she had also been listening to what was being said. ‘She could have been in love with him, of course,' she pointed out. ‘She came to the island as his fiancée, I understand.’

‘Accompanied by his sister,’ the elder Miss Crabtree agreed primly. ‘She was Queen Joanna of Sicily, and Richard was on his way to Palestine on a Crusade.’ They piled back into the mini-bus and Anna drove out along the Paphos road, wondering suddenly if Andreas had found someone to go to Paphos with him to view the flat he wanted to buy.

Dramatically the Castle of Kolossi stood in the fields ahead of them. ‘Does anyone want to go in?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, please!’ It was almost a chorus of consent. ‘What a view there must be from the top of the tower!’ She explained about the Knights Hospitallers and the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem as they filed across the drawbridge to the keep to admire the three vaulted rooms on the ground floor. Mrs Walsh pressed on ahead to inspect the kitchen with its large fireplace which ‘you could get lost in if you were not careful'.

Both floors were lit by fine window-seats on to which the elderly members of the party sank with relief after negotiating the winding stairs, and Anna took this opportunity to warn them that the final stairway to the crenellated terrace above was both winding and, in places, dark.

‘I should have brought a torch,’ she confessed belatedly, hoping that no one would fall.

Half the party stayed where they were, content with the view they already had from the stone window-seats, but Mrs Walsh puffed her way gallantly to the top.

‘I made it!’ she exclaimed, crossing to the high parapet to look down over the fertile land beneath, to the Salt Lake and the wide bay of Akrotiri glittering in the sun. They tell me these vine fields have been here for hundreds and hundreds of years and the wine is still exported to this day.’

'The Commandaria,’ Anna said automatically. ‘You can order it at the hotel.’

She was not really listening to Mrs Walsh because a man and a woman were standing on the far side of the ramparts deep in conversation, so absorbed in what they had to say to one another that they seemed oblivious to anyone else.

Hastily she turned away. The man was Andreas. There could be no doubting the fact as his tall figure seemed to shut out the sunshine for a moment, his dark head bent attentively, listening to what his companion was telling him.

Someone asked her a question.

‘Oh, yes—sugar. Sugar was produced here, too, in the cane-growing villages,’ she explained obligingly. ‘You can see the mill down there on the outside of the tower and the aquaduct which carried the river water for irrigation. Madder was also grown ’

She was aware of Andreas and his companion standing on the edge of the small circle which had formed around her, but she did not look up. He could smile, if he pleased, at her inadequate explanations, but she would not let him see that his unexpected presence in the tower had shattered her calm.

Other questions were asked and she tried to answer them, looking over the parapet to the vast plain below. When she turned, Andreas and his companion were standing in the archway ready to leave and he met her eyes with a wry smile curving his mouth before he disappeared down the winding stairway ahead of his companion.

How arrestingly beautiful she was, Anna thought, but it was no one she knew. Perhaps it was a fellow-guest he had picked up at the Crescent Beach after she had refused to go to Paphos with him, a woman who could just as easily advise him about the flat he hoped to buy as she could have done.

The image of the tall, elegant stranger stamped itself on her mind: the pale, golden hair looped into a loose chignon behind the shapely head, the classical profile which seemed so much in keeping with her surroundings that she might almost have lived in such a castle all her life, and, above all, the blue, dark-lashed eyes which had met her own for a fleeting moment as they passed, smiling eyes which reflected the sunshine although a shadow of remembered pain seemed to lurk in their depths.

‘And now for Kurion!’ the elder Miss Crabtree announced, looking at her map. ‘We’ll go there, won’t we?’

‘Of course.’ Anna seemed to rouse herself from a dream. ‘It’s our next stop.’

She wondered if she would see Andreas and his companion again, but no doubt they had gone straight on by the main road to Paphos to view the flat.

Turning the mini-bus to the left, she drove up the natural acropolis of the cliff which dominated the wide arc of Episkopi Bay and the whole peninsula, with Cape Gata splendid in the sunshine and the Salt Lake glittering far below.

‘Can we get out,’ someone asked, ‘even if it’s only for the view?’

Anna explained about the Mosaic of Achilles.

‘Wasn’t he the guy who dressed up as a woman,’ a cynical voice enquired, ‘and then had a change of mind when everyone else was going to war?’

‘You’ll see it all inside’ Anna smiled. ‘I’ll give you a leaflet.’ She intended to stay out in the sun, not because she might meet Andreas and his beautiful companion poring over the mosaics, she assured herself, but because the wind from the south blew strongly against her as she stood on the cliff, cooling her cheeks. This was the ‘cool porticoes’ of the ancients and she stood quite still, waiting for the time to pass.

When her small party rejoined her on the headland they walked to the theatre and the baths and then to the horseshoe of the stadium where she pointed out the starting-line for the runners and the seven rows of seats still visible among the stones. They had the vast amphitheatre to themselves; there was no one else to be seen.

Going back to the mini-bus, she drove them to the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates through the grove of pines and cypress, and almost immediately she saw Andreas standing in front of one of the Doric columns. Etched against the backdrop of an incredibly blue sky, he seemed too engrossed in his companion to notice that they were about to be disturbed. Anna was alone. The others had gone off in different directions, marvelling at all they saw and pointing their cameras at everything in sight. When Andreas turned they were barely a few yards apart, but he did not seem surprised that she should be there. He held out his hand to the woman by his side to help her across the rough ground between them.

‘I thought we would find you here,’ he said to Anna, ‘or at the White Rock, which is a must with most tourists.’ He drew his companion forward, his hand gentle on her arm. ‘Lara has fallen in love with our island,’ he said, ‘and she would like to meet you.’

Anna stood quite still, looking back into the flawless face of the other woman with a fascination which was difficult to explain. No immediate greeting came to her mind, no words which could possibly describe how she felt. It was as if they had met before, long ago when all the ruined shrines and temples round about them had been peopled by men and women of a different age and culture whose emotions had been fundamentally the same as their own. The older woman was holding out her hand.

‘Your wonderful, wonderful country!’ she said in accented English. ‘I am much in love with it, and Andreas has been so kind, showing me the places that will interest me most. You also take strangers around, Miss Rossides,’ she added with a slow, enchanting smile. ‘I heard you explaining to your guests about that wonderful castle of Kolossi and I am fascinated by its story. How well you explain everything that is past!’ The tone of voice, the interest in those compelling half- sad eyes appeared genuine enough, yet Anna found herself holding back from complete acceptance.

‘It’s part of my job, at least for today,’ she explained. ‘Normally we have a proper guide but she has a throat infection and was unable to come.'

‘Is that what happened to Helen Stylianu?’ Andreas asked. ‘I wondered. By the way,’ he added, ‘this is Lara Warrender. She has lived in America for a long time but now she is considering Cyprus as a new home—a villa somewhere in the mountains, perhaps.’

Anna waited for him to complete the introduction, but apparently he had no need to do so. Lara Warrender already knew who she was.

‘I hope you will find what you want in the Troodos,’ she said almost stiltedly. ‘There are plenty of holiday homes there to chose from.'

Lara smiled. ‘At the moment we are looking for a flat for Andreas,’ she said, ‘but, of course, you will know about that. He is determined to have a place which is his own apart from the hotel.’

Andreas stood aside for them to walk along the narrow pathway together, but Anna shook her head.

‘I must wait for my party,’ she pointed out. ‘We are going on to Pelea Paphos and the Temple of Aphrodite.’

‘Don’t forget
I Petra tou Romiou!'
he laughed. ‘It will bear retelling although it is only a legend, after all.’

Anna drew in a quick breath, aware that he was reminding her deliberately of the past.

‘What is this legend that you keep so much to yourself?’ Lara demanded, immediately interested.

‘It’s about a hero—a Greek—who was supposed to have thrown a large boulder from the top of the hill of Ktima at a false queen who had spurned his love,’ Andreas explained without looking at Anna. ‘It missed her, of course, and fell into the sea, where it can still be seen!’

‘Perhaps we will go there, also,’ Lara suggested, ‘if it is on our way to Paphos.’

Andreas looked at his watch. ‘I doubt if there will be time’ he said ‘if we are going on to Troodos after we have seen the flat. We can come back another day.’

Which meant that this was no casual friendship, Anna thought, as she turned back to collect her scattered party, no brief encounter in an hotel lounge which would last for a week or two and then be forgotten.

She drove away from the Temple of Apollo determined to dismiss Andreas and Lara Warrender from her mind for the rest of the day, but she could not avoid a stop at the legendary White Rock where Aphrodite, daughter of the foam and goddess of beauty and fertility rose out of the sea. So many times in the past she had come here, sometimes with Andreas and sometimes alone, and she was forced to remember him vividly as if he was by her side now, standing in that high place above the sea. She avoided a visit to the Rock of the Greek, however, telling her party that it was no more than an overdrawn legend which should now be entirely forgotten.

For the remainder of the tour she drove automatically, stopping at the places of greatest interest along the way, and eventually she made a detour from Polis to a waterside taverna where they were served the fish of their choice from an enormous tank which the jovial proprietor whisked away to be cooked over a charcoal grill by his smiling wife.

‘This is what I like!’ Mrs Walsh declared, shedding her straw hat and enormous satchel on the table. ‘Eating native! It isn’t a bit of use going to the latest five-star hotel you can find and having a French menu thrust under your nose, no matter where you are.’

Anna advised them about the wine.

‘You’ll eat with us, of course,’ Mrs Walsh insisted, ‘and tell us all about that spectacular couple you met at— where was it, now? The Temple of something-or-other. I have it written down somewhere, but you know the place I mean. We saw you speaking to them while we were photographing the ruins.’

‘He was a friend of my family at one time,’ Anna told her briefly, selecting red mullet from the platter offered to her by the proprietor. ‘It was—a long time ago.’

‘He’s so handsome!’ Mrs Walsh sighed. ‘And that elegant lady he was with? Don’t tell me she is his wife. They were too-too perfect together!’

‘They are not married,’ Anna returned almost sharply. ‘I don’t know how long they have known each other. They could have met anywhere. In England even.’

‘She’s not English, by the look of her,’ Hilary Walsh decided. ‘Scandinavian, I would say—or even German. That fair, Nordic type isn’t difficult to place.’

‘Nationality doesn’t come into it when she can look like that!’ one of the younger men decided. ‘She stopped me dead in my tracks when I saw her standing there among all these marble columns like some lost goddess looking for the way back to Olympus. And those eyes! Did you see them? Blue as the heavens above her, but dark too, as if life had dealt her a raw deal, one way or another.’

‘Your imagination will land you in trouble one of these days,’ his companion told him. ‘Why don’t you just order some wine and forget about Greek goddesses for a while—or even Scandinavian ones! I’m ravenous. I thought we were never going to eat!’

The taverna had been an excellent idea, Anna realised, as the lavish Cypriot meal was set before them and their choice of wine was poured by the proprietor himself who was determined to please everybody. There was no formality as platter after platter was placed before them and they ate heartily, looking out through the open windows to the sea.

When it was time to go they shook hands with their delighted host, promising to come again if they could.

The return journey through the olive and citrus groves evidently made their day complete, but for Anna the strong fragrance of orange blossom wafting towards them from the wayside orchards only served to renew old memories which she was trying so hard to forget. She had sought to put them behind her for ever, but Andreas' return and their meeting on those high cliffs above the sea had renewed them all, bringing back the long, warm summers of their youth to mock her brave resolve. Their friendship had been a very precious thing, strong yet delicate, and he had severed it deliberately when he had gone away.

The sun was setting when they finally reached the Villa Severus, the lights along the bay pricking out, one by one, to challenge the stars already appearing in the night sky. It was a relief to be home, but everyone seemed to have enjoyed themselves and she felt satisfied with the effort she had made to please them.