"The two women smirked."I am Antoinette Giry, Christine's guardian. And, you are?" I am Elaine Mallery, Monsieur Destler's housekeeper. It is a pleasu...e to meet you. May I say that Christine is a lovely girl? You must be very proud." Yes," she nodded with only the slightest hint of sadness in her eyes, "I only wish that her father could have been here. He would be so pleased to know she has found such a good man." Her father rests with the angels? Ah, I wondered at the sadness buried deep in. From somewhere in the Beowulf super-cluster of processors that provided me with my home, an idea began to percolate. It had been running around in my memory banks for a while now, but now – with my own 'place' in the internet, my own mainframe of sorts – I finally had enough processing power to give it a real effort. No longer would I have to suspend things when a real user came online in Sri Lanka or Paris or Minneapolis, or when an Atlantic tropical storm demanded the attention of the. " How is that?" As I've told you before I used to baby-sit Karen. Even as a child she was very difficult. As early as high school I'd been interested in hypnosis and had been doing quite a bit of reading. I finally got to the point in my studies where I wanted to have a practice subject and on a lark I asked Karen to volunteer. She was very young and thought of it as a great adventure. I confess that my ulterior motive was to make her go to sleep when she was told to. Eventually I was. He tells them he’s taking me out and that he’ll be back later. I’m confused at his comment, not knowing we were going back out. He comes back over to me before we head into the hotel room. “You fancy going out to eat with me? If not, I’m stuck playing another round of twenty questions with the guys.” “Ah, I don’t mind no.” I'm feeling light headed by now. No mortal has ever shown such interest in my company. Once again, I can feel that attraction to him, so of course I wanted to go! I wanted to.