Laura

“Another silence. He was standing very still now. Was it a trick of the mist or was he really a very long way away from me, a lonely figure in the queerly-lit darkness? It came to me suddenly that this was how I would always remember him, someone standing alone, apart from the others even of his own family. And, I think for the first time, I began to see him as he really was—not any more as a projection of my young romantic longings, not any more as Prince Charming, the handsome sophisticate, the tiger I thought I preferred. . . . This was Raoul, who had been a quiet, lonely little boy in a house that was "not a house for children," an unhappy adolescent brought up in the shadowof a megalomaniac father, a young man fighting bitterly to save his small inheritance from ruin . . . wild, perhaps, hard, perhaps, plunging off the beaten track more than once . . . but always alone. Wrapped up in my loneliness and danger I hadn't even seen that his need was the same as my own. He and I had hoed the same row, and he for a more bitter harvest.”
― Mary Stewart, NINE COACHES WAITING