Borrowed some things from MM's GWTW for this chapter, but unless you get the book out it isn't as much as you'd initially think (don't get me wrong, it was a good deal) but I believe I blended her words and mine into a fairly seamless cloth.

Scarlett was pleased to see that Rosemary was still wearing her hair back from her face but flowing down her back just as Scarlett had styled it earlier. The jasmine oil that she had dabbed on Rosemary's wrists still gently scented the air around her sister in law.

"Why are you smiling like that?" asked Rosemary curiously.

"Because you look lovely," replied Scarlett.

Rosemary gave her a bright smile. "Mother thought my hair looked very becoming."

"It does make you look more carefree."

Rosemary blushed self-consciously. She knew she looked wonderful, the mirror in the hall had confirmed that only minutes ago. She looked fresh, more like a young woman and less like a stern matron. Perhaps someone else would notice her transformation, clearly there was quite a bit she could learn from Scarlett, like for instance that thing she did with her eyelashes. It was an odd fluttery sort of thing but men seemed to be drawn by it.

She spread her skirts so that she wouldn't crumple them by sitting on the bunched up fabric and settled into the chair next to the bed. "Trust me, you'll like these poems, Rhett brought me the book back from London months ago. They are very different from anything else I've ever read."

"I'm not sure, poetry isn't really my cup of tea so to speak," said Scarlett hesitantly.

"And being groomed like a mare wasn't on my to do list today but I submitted. Now listen maybe you'll enjoy one." Rosemary skimmed several pages thoughtfully till she found one that she felt was worthy of being shared.

"PALE amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer's loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet:
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time's deceit.

Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees."

Rosemary closed the book keeping her thumb in the book to save the page.

"I love his prose but I have to say I don't completely understand it. I mean I understand the actual lines but I suppose I've never been in love in the fall and I suppose that's why the idea of it is so foreign to me. What did you think Scarlett?"

She didn't hear Rosemary; she was a million miles away and nearly 7 years in the past when Rhett would meet her nearly everyday accidentally in the woods that were on the edge of Atlanta. In the heart of the woods were her lumber mills, she had been very pregnant then 5 months or so and driving the buggy tired her out more than she would have ever admitted, if she had admitted just how tired it made her, Frank would have locked her in their room and she would have lost everything.

She was sure that he frequently threw business her way, for he knew all the rich Yankees and Carpetbaggers intimately, but he always denied being helpful. She knew him for what he was and she never trusted him, but her spirits always rose with pleasure at the sight of him riding around the curve of a shady road on his big black horse. What had the horse's name been, had she ever bothered to ask him? Of course not because she hadn't cared about him she had only admitted that he made her feel safe and protected at a time in her life when she need the security of a man desperately.

When he climbed into the buggy and took the reins from her and threw her some

impertinent remark, she felt young and gay and attractive again, for all her worries and her increasing bulk. She could talk to him about almost everything, with no care for concealing her motives or her real opinions and she never ran out of things to say as she did with Frank--or even with Ashley.

Good God what had she ever really had to say to Ashley, only longing looks and convoluted discussions of honor and being honorable in the face of a world that was nothing like the one that had reared them. What use was that world she thought, it died and left most of the people in it without the gumption or iron to pull themselves up.

Grandma Fountaine and her analogy about wheat and buckwheat had been right, it had taken her years but she finally understood what the old woman had meant, some people break and others bend and then rise back up.

What had Rhett said about her and the reason why so much of the old guard disliked and disapproved of her? Yes, it was that she liked to work and obviously wasn't going to let any man tend to her business for her. He had told her no one could feel sorry for her and Atlanta and people in general liked nothing better than feeling sorry for people. It built them up by comparison.

His voice was in her ear as though he were speaking in the present and not on a long past autumn day. "Did you ever hear the Oriental proverb: The dogs bark but the caravan passes on? Let them bark, Scarlett. I fear nothing will

stop your caravan."

But now she had come to a bone jarring halt, unable to stand or walk, dependent on a man who felt sorry for her but no longer loved her. He was standing by her out of a misplaced sense of personal responsibility and that grated. She had never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her and to have that unpleasant emotion from Rhett was depressing.

She shook off unpleasant truths as she had shook them off before and would always continue to. It was pleasant for a change to look back, before Bonnie died and her marriage had ended. Before she and Rhett had exchanged words that could never be taken back. They had talked about being poor and well received or rich and shut out from all that was considered decent in the south. She had asked him if thought she had made the right choices. She could still remember so much of their conversation almost verbatim.

"If it's money you want most," he said lighting a cigar.

"Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world." She had been a fool that Scarlett, what good was money without people you love to spend it on?

He smiled at her answer, given without a moment's hesitation. "Then you've made the only choice. But there's a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It's loneliness."

"I think--I think," she began hesitantly, "that I've always been lonely where women were concerned. It isn't just my working that makes Atlanta ladies dislike me. They just don't like me anyway. No woman ever really liked me, except Mother. Even my sisters were never overly fond of me.. I don't know why, but even before the war, even before I married Charlie, ladies didn't seem to approve of anything I did--"

"You forget Mrs. Wilkes," said Rhett and his eyes gleamed maliciously. "She has always approved of you up to the hilt. I daresay she'd approve of anything you did, short of murder."

She smiled briefly to herself at that memory. She remembered thinking grimly: 'She's even approved of murder.'

Melanie who had thought anything Scarlett did was right no matter why she did it. To see Melanie she would have given ten years of her own life, she would live poor and impoverished and do it with real grace for a chance to see Melanie and tell her everything about how she had felt for Ashley. She would have liked to give Melanie the chance to spit in her eye or forgive her. Oh Melly, I miss you so. Melly would have sorted out the mess between herself and Rhett in a trice.

Then she had made that stupid comment about them having grandchildren and Rhett had twisted it, embarrassing her.

It was more than his joking words that shamed her, for she was then aware of her thickening body. They had never even hinted at her condition and she had always kept the lap robe high under her armpits when with him, even on warm days. Scarlett shook her head, she had comforted herself in the ridiculous feminine manner with the belief that she did not show at all when thus covered. She had been sick with quick rage at her own condition and shame that he should know.

Of course he would have known, Rhett's sharp eyes never missed a thing and something as glaring as her pregnant body? Now that she knew why he had always met her she couldn't believe she had once been so naïve as to think he had been unaware.

But she had been angry that he dared to allude to the fact that she was with child. She ordered him out of the buggy but Rhett being Rhett he refused.

"I'll do nothing of the kind," he returned calmly. "It'll be dark before you get home and there's a new colony of darkies living in tents and shanties near the next spring, mean so I've been told, and I see no reason why you should give the impulsive Ku Klux a cause for putting on their nightshirts and riding abroad this evening."

In reflection the fact that he said that seem to almost foreshadow what happened to Frank, if she had only listened to Rhett, Frank wouldn't have died. But then Bonnie would have never been born at least she was sure that herself and Frank could have never produced a child like Bonnie, so that made Frank's death sad but worth the guilt she carried at being the cause of it.

The afternoon sun, slanting low through the falling leaves spun sickeningly for a few moments in a swirl of gold and red. When the spell had passed, she had put her head in her hands and cried from sheer mortification. She felt that she could never look him in the face again. She had cried, expecting some coarse and jocular remark from him, which she would never be able to forget. But he had only been kind and…loving.

He had loved her even then. Frank would have been mortified and stiff. He would never have consoled her, but Rhett had. He had said everything she had needed to hear. And all because he loved her. There had been something else another clue to that love, but what was it. She thought and finally it came to her. She should have realized that he loved her.

"Don't be a fool," he had said quietly. "And you are a fool, if you are crying for shame. Come, Scarlett, don't be a child. Surely you must know that, not being blind, I knew you were pregnant. You are a child if you thought I didn't know, for all your smothering yourself under that hot lap robe. Of course, I knew. Why else do you think I've been--"

Scarlett sick in bed in Charleston put her face in her hands and cried. Cried at her stupidity and the loss that stemmed from it. If only's screamed in her mind and caught the breath in her chest. If only she had seen that he was willing to protect her even when she had another man's child in her body. If only he had said he loved her when he still did, maybe she would have thrown herself at that love. If only she had told him when she had realized that she loved him when he had returned with Bonnie from Charleston. She had confused her fondness for one man with love for another and everything in their lives fell apart.