“Did you love his father?” he asked.

She felt an almost physical shock at the words. She closed her eyes and felt slightly dizzy. Now he had intruded upon her private world-her private pain. Perhaps it was a fair exchange.

“No,” she said. “No, I did not. I hated him. God help me, I hated him.”

“Where is he?” he asked.

“Dead.”

She had never ever been able to feel one moment’s sorrow over that fact-or one pang of guilt over the fact that she may have been in some small way to blame.

“Shall we continue on our way?” he suggested, pushing away from the tree.

“Yes.”

It was a relief to walk again, and she could see the bridge and the end of the valley ahead and the grassy dunes that separated it from the beach.

They admired the three stone arches that supported the bridge as they passed beneath it and a few minutes later waded over the grassy sand dunes to the harder, more level sand of the small beach, which was enclosed by cliffs that drew the eye ahead to the blue, foam-flecked sea and upward to the paler blue of the sky. The stream had separated into many strands around the dunes and flowed in little runnels down the beach to the sea.

Yesterday, Anne thought, they had admitted their loneliness to each other. Today they had denied their fragility. Yesterday they had spoken the truth. Today, she suspected, they had both lied.

They were both fragile. He would never again paint. She would never have a husband and home and more children of her own.

“One cannot dwell upon what is forever lost,” he said as if his thoughts had been following a parallel path to hers. “I cannot grow back my eye and my arm just as you cannot get back your innocence or your reputation in the eyes of society. I have gained something that was possible for me, though. I have made myself into the best steward in all of Britain. Have you made yourself into the best teacher?”

He turned to look at her and she could see that his lips were drawn up into that strangely attractive, lopsided grin again.

“In Britain?” She set one hand over her heart and looked at him in mock horror. “I would disdain to set my goals so low, Mr. Butler. I have made myself into the world’s best teacher.”

They both laughed at the silly joke-and she felt a sudden, totally startling sexual awareness of him.

She turned and ran lightly down the beach, stopping only when her feet threatened to sink into the wet sand left behind by the receding tide. She was seriously discomposed by her feelings. She usually had far better control over them. And to have such feelings for him-for Mr. Butler! She still found it hard to look directly at him.

He had come after her, she realized. She turned her head to smile at him.

“Listen!” she said.

“Some people do not even hear it,” he said after a few silent moments. “The elemental roar of the sea can easily be mistaken for silence.”

They stood side by side listening intently.

But after a while it seemed to Anne that it was her heartbeat she heard.

Or his.

And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but…alive.

Sydnam found her company both exhilarating and disturbing.

She asked some very direct questions, ones that his family and close friends carefully avoided, and ones that even in his thoughts he skirted around whenever possible. But he had asked her some rather personal questions too. He supposed that those who knew her avoided asking about the father of her child.

She had hated the man.

Had she been raped, then? Or did she hate him because he had refused to marry her after impregnating her?

She was beautiful beyond belief, especially when she smiled or was lost in the loveliness of her surroundings. Yet she was with him. He had asked her to come walking and she had said yes. When he was with her he almost forgot what she had to look at when she looked at him. With her he felt…undamaged.

Looking at her, it was hard to realize that in her own way she was as damaged and as vulnerable as he. He turned his head and watched the waves break into foam at the edge of the beach and then get sucked back by the force of the ebbing tide.

Was he vulnerable, then? He had spent the past six or seven years making very sure that he was strong in every way possible. But in some ways he knew very well that he had not fully succeeded and never would. He had admitted to loneliness, had he not? Despite fulfilling work and several good friends, he was essentially lonely. Just as she was. And one reason why he liked living here was that he met very few strangers. Looking as he did, it was impossible not to cringe from the look in the eyes of strangers when they saw him for the first time.

While he was enjoying feasting his eyes on a lovely woman, she must look at least occasionally at monstrous ugliness. He had never been conceited about his good looks, but…Well.

“When the tide is fully out,” he told her before he could be consumed by the dreaded self-pity, pointing to their right, “it is possible to walk around the end of those jutting rocks to the main beach. But as the tide is now, this area is cut off and secluded.”

“All this reminds me very much of Cornwall,” she said. “Every mile of the coastline reveals a new and quite different splendor. If we were to climb up on those rocks, would we be able to see the other beach?”

“Yes, but they are high and rather rugged,” he warned.

She laughed.

“That sounds like a challenge,” she said, and strode toward them.

He always enjoyed clambering over the rocks, sometimes with the sea on three sides of him while he gazed at the panoramic view or searched the pools the high tides had left behind for shellfish and other marine life. He liked to challenge himself, climbing out where the absence of one arm and eye and the presence of a somewhat weak knee made progress difficult, even hazardous.

Some things were now impossible to him. But they had to be undeniably impossible, and not just improbable, before he would give up on them.

Painting was one impossibility.

Rock climbing was not.

“Oh, look!” she said when they were up on the rocks, well above the level of the small beach but not yet high enough to see over the top. She had noticed a cluster of seashells in a small sandy indentation at her feet and was stooping to examine and pick up a few of them. She set one on her palm and held it out for him to see. “Could anything possibly be more exquisite?”

“I cannot think of anything,” he admitted.

“Is not nature a marvel?” she said, sitting down on a flat-topped rock and arranging the shells on her knee.

“Always,” he agreed, “even when its effects are catastrophic to the humans who have tried to control or defy it. It is the quintessentially perfect artist and can also produce something as fragile and exquisite as these.”

He seated himself on a rock close to hers and looked down at the beach with the valley above it. Why would anyone choose to live inland when they could live close to the sea?

They sat in silence for a while, the sun warm on their heads, the breeze cool on their faces. How lovely it was, he thought, to have a companion here with him. And it struck him that though he had friends in the neighborhood, he never went walking or even riding with any of them. Whenever he came here, he was always alone-until now.

But in the future he would always remember that she had been here with him. He would remember her as she was at this moment, the brim of her bonnet fluttering slightly in the breeze, her posture graceful but relaxed, her long, slim fingers touching one of the shells almost reverently, the rocks behind one of her shoulders, the sea beyond the other, one shade darker than her dress-the same dress she had worn yesterday.

She lifted her head and met his gaze.

“How did it happen?” she asked him.

The question could have referred to any number of things. But he knew exactly what she was asking.

“I was an officer,” he said, “in the Peninsula Wars.”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew that.”

He looked away from her.

“It was torture,” he said. “I was on a special mission with my brother and we were trapped in the mountains by a French scouting party. There was the possibility that one of us could escape with the important papers we carried if the other acted as a decoy and courted certain capture. Kit was experienced while I was decidedly not. And he was my superior officer. I volunteered to be the decoy so that he would not have the painful duty of ordering me to do so. We were not in uniform.”

And that fact had made all the difference, of course. If he had been wearing a uniform, he would have been treated with courtesy and honor as a British officer by his captors.

One of her fingers was smoothing over the shell she had held up for his inspection.

“They wanted information about Kit and his mission,” he told her, “and they set out methodically over the next week or so to get it from me. They started with my right eye and worked their way down. Kit and a group of Spanish partisans rescued me when they had reached my knee.”

“They were still torturing you,” she said. It was not a question. “You had not given them the information they needed, then?”

“No,” he said.

Her fingers curled about all the shells and held them enclosed in a white-knuckled fist on her knee.

“You are incredibly brave,” she said.

Her praise warmed him. He had been expecting her to say something like-oh, you poor man. It was the usual reaction. It had been his family’s reaction. Kit had spent years tormenting himself and blaming himself.