perfunctory peck so much the practice in the times in which they lived, but a tender, passionate embrace, as if it might be their last.

"Nat, there's been someone around the house today. I'm worried," Abby finally said.

The muscles in his stomach tightened. "Maybe they've traced us. What did he look like?"

"He was tall, severe, in fact he could almost pass for old Jonathan Borden, the man who was in charge of my execution, the man who read the charges against me."

"Anton Bor!" Nat said hoarsely. "The head man of the TIC!"

Abby threw her arms around Nat, buried her head in his shoulder. Her arms held him with desperation. "Oh darling, we've been so happy these past five years. They can't separate us. I'd rather die first!"

He tipped her head back, kissed the tears that had trickled down each cheek. "If they catch us, we'll probably both die. But at least we're ready for them."

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Through the front curtains he glimpsed a car in front of the house. A hasty look out the back revealed another one parked in the alley.

"Quick, Abby, into the basement before they use a paralysis ray," he whispered. Aloud he shouted, "Just a moment!" to the person at the front door.

With nervous fingers Nat unlocked a heavily reinforced door in the basement. He heard a crash upstairs as the front door was battered in. At almost the same instant he swung the door open and they stepped into the time machine. With movements they had practiced many times, he tripped the activating lever and the machine vanished, leaving the hiding place Nat had built around the machine after they had bought the house several years earlier.

They weren't a moment too soon, for both felt the slight tingling of a paralysis ray. Their departure had occurred just at the split second when one of Bor's TIC men had pushed the firing stud. Even so, it clouded Nat's vision, slowed his reflexes.

"Another second and they'd have had us, Abby," he said aloud, after he had returned to normal.

She pressed her lips to his. "I hated to leave 1925, but we can start over again wherever you say," Abby whispered.

The surf crashed and boomed on the coral reef. Nat lay in the shade of a cocoanut palm, watching 

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