“I believe,” he said, “we are dealing with the half-empty-glass attitude versus the half-full-glass attitude again. Are we by any chance talking philosophy? It is an alarming possibility. If we are not careful we will be trying to decide next how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”

“None at all or an infinite number,” she said. “I have never been sure which. If there is a correct answer.”

“Well,” he said, chuckling, “shall we agree to live this particular endless moment strictly in the present tense? Or this myriad succession of present moments?”

“Yes, we will so agree,” she said, laughing with him again.

And as they strolled onward, Susanna lifted her face to the changing patterns of light and shade, warmth and coolness, and was aware of the sounds of birdsong and insect whirrings and the scurrying of unseen wildlife and the smells of earth and greenery and a masculine cologne. She felt every irregularity, every small stone on the path beneath her feet, the firm but relaxed muscles of his arm beneath her hand, warm through the sleeve of his coat.

She turned her head again to smile at him and found that he was smiling back-a lazy, genuine, happy smile.

“I see a seat up ahead,” he said. “It is my guess that it looks out on a pleasing prospect.”

“It does,” she said. “This path was very carefully constructed for the pleasure of the walker, as you observed yourself when we walked to the waterfall.”

They stood behind the seat for a while, looking through what appeared to be a natural opening between trees across wide lawns to the house and stables in the distance. An old oak tree in the middle of the lawn was perfectly framed in the view.

And she was here now looking at the view, Susanna thought, deliberately feeling the soft fabric of his coat sleeve without actually moving her hand.

“The path moves up into that hill,” she said, pointing ahead. “There are some lovely views from up there. The best, though, I think, is the one down onto the river and the little bridge.”

They stopped a number of times before they came there, gazing alternately out onto the cultivated beauty of the park and over the rural peace and plenty of the surrounding farmland.

“I wish you could see Sidley,” he said, squinting off into the distance when they were looking across a patchwork of fields, separated by low hedgerows. “You did say you had never been there, did you not? It always seems to me that there is nowhere to compare with it in beauty. I suppose I am partial. Undoubtedly I am partial, in fact. It smites me here.” He tapped his heart and then turned to her suddenly and smiled roguishly. “It smites this chest organ, this pump.”

“The heart, the center of our most tender sensibilities,” she conceded, “even if only because we feel they must be centered somewhere. It must indeed be wonderful to have a home of your very own. I can well imagine that you would come to see it more with the emotions than with the eye or the intellect.”

“I hope you will have a home of your own one day,” he said, tapping her hand as it rested on his arm.

They strolled onward, following the path down through the lower, wooded slopes of the hill until it climbed again into the open and they could see down to the river, narrower here than it was closer to the lake. And there was the little wooden footbridge that spanned it, so highly arched that the path across it formed actual steps up to the middle and down the other side. The water flowing beneath it was dark green from the reflections of trees growing thickly up the slopes from its banks.

“Ah, yes,” he said as they stopped walking, “you were quite right. This is the best view of all. Even better than the view from the waterfall. That is spectacular, but like most of the views here it encompasses both the wilderness and the outside world. This is nothing but wilderness.”

Susanna let go of his arm and turned all about. The hill rose behind them to meet the sky. On the other three sides there was nothing to see but trees. Below were more trees and undergrowth and ferns and the river and bridge.

“I had not really noticed that before,” she said. “But it is true. That must be why I love being just here so much. It offers total…”

“Escape?”

But she frowned and shook her head.

“Retreat,”she said. “It is a better word, I think.”

“Shall we sit down for a while?” he suggested. “There is no seat just here, but I don’t suppose the ground is damp. There has been no rain for several days, has there?”

He stooped down on his haunches and rubbed his hand hard across the grass. He held the hand up, palm out, to show her that it was dry.

She sat down, drawing her knees up before her and clasping her arms about them. He stretched out on his side beside her, lifting himself onto one elbow and propping his head on one hand while the other rubbed lightly over the grass.

The sun beamed down warm on their heads.

“Oh, listen,” she said after a few moments.

His hand fell still.

“The waterfall?”

“Yes.”

They both listened for a while before he lifted his hand from the grass and set it lightly over one of hers about her knees.

“Susanna,” he said, “I am going to miss you.”

“We are not supposed to be thinking about the future,” she said, but she had to draw a slow, steadying breath before she spoke.

“No,” he agreed. His hand slid from hers and he tossed his hat aside and lay back on the grass, one leg bent at the knee with his booted foot flat on the ground, the back of one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

There was the rawness of threatened pain at the back of her throat. It was no easy thing to hold the future at bay. She concentrated her mind again upon the distant sound of the waterfall.

“Do you ever wish,” he asked after a couple of minutes, “that you were totally free?”

“I dream of it all the time,” she said.

“So do I.”

Two weeks ago-less-she would have assumed that such a man had all the freedom he could possibly want or need. Indeed, it had seemed to her that most men were essentially free.

“What ungrateful wretches we are,” he said with a low chuckle.

“But it is not freedom from school or from relative poverty or from anything else in my circumstances that I yearn for,” she said. “It is…Oh, I once heard it described as the yearning for God, though that is not quite it either. It is just-mmm…”

“The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?” he suggested.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh.

“Are we talking philosophy again?” he asked, and he removed his hand from his eyes, turned his head, and grinned up at her. “Twice in one afternoon? I think I must be sickening for something.”

She laughed and looked back at him.

And something happened.

Suddenly the moment was very present indeed, as if past and future had faded to nothingness or else collapsed into the present. And the moment was simply magic.

And unbearably tense.

Their eyes held, and neither spoke as their smiles faded-until he lifted his hand and set the knuckles lightly against her cheek.

“Susanna,” he said softly.

She could have said or done any number of things to cause time to tick back into motion. But she did none of them-did not even consider any of them, in fact. She was suspended in the wonder of the moment.

She turned her head so that her lips were against his knuckles. And she gazed down into his eyes, violet and smoky and as deep as the ocean.

He slid the hand down and pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. He brushed it backward and it fell to the grass behind her. She felt the air warm against her face and cool in her slightly damp hair. He cupped her face in both hands and drew it downward. She released her tight hold on her legs and turned so that she was kneeling beside him.

And then their lips met-again.

It was a kiss as brief-and as earth-shattering-as the last one. He lifted her face away from his and gazed up into her eyes, his thumbs circling her cheeks.

“Let me kiss you,” he said.

It was something of an absurd request, perhaps, in light of the fact that he had just done exactly that without asking permission. But despite her almost total lack of experience with kisses, she possessed enough woman’s intuition to know exactly what he meant.

“Yes,” she whispered.

She continued to kneel over him, one hand spread over his chest, the other bracing herself on the grass on the far side of him, while he kissed her again.

But this time the kiss did not end after a brief moment. It did not end at all for a long, long time. And this time it was not a mere touching or brushing of lips.

This time his lips were parted and warm and moist, and he nibbled at her lower lip with his teeth and touched both her lips with his tongue and with its tip traced the seam between them from one corner to the other and back again but pressing a little more firmly this time until it curled up behind her top lip to caress the soft, sensitive flesh inside. And then he feathered little kisses across her mouth and down to her chin before kissing her fully again, his mouth pressed harder, more urgently to hers. His tongue pushed past her lips, past her teeth deep into her mouth. And then finally the kiss softened, and he lifted her head away from his again.

His eyes were heavy-lidded as they gazed into hers.

“Lie down beside me,” he suggested. “You look uncomfortable.”