He stared broodingly at the door after she had left the room. He ought, he supposed, to have stopped to think, to consider, before coming here. But, devil take it, it was his life, and there must be a way of living it to his own satisfaction and doing his duty by his family and position at the same time.

But how could he have thought or considered? When he had left the house on

Brock Street

, he had not known where he was going.

He had certainly not known why.

Or had he?

He gazed out the window with unseeing eyes, looking back wistfully on the time, not too long ago, when his life had been uncomplicated and perfectly satisfactory.

Well, it would be satisfactory again, dash it all.

It would.

He had promised to find the perfect bride.

But there was more than one kind of perfection.

He paid their way into Sydney Gardens, just on the other side of the road at Sydney Place, and they walked along beside a bowling green until the path wound upward, twisting and turning as it did so between lawns and among trees whose branches swayed and tossed in the wind.

It was not by any means an ideal day for strolling in any park. There was not another soul in sight apart from the two of them.

Frances shivered even though she was dressed warmly—in the exact cloak and bonnet and half-boots she had been wearing the first time she met him, in fact, she realized suddenly. She felt chilled to the bone, but not so much from the buffeting of the weather as from the fact that she was actually walking here beside him again, one day after she thought he had returned to London, two days after they had said good-bye forever—again.

She had already lived through a day of pain so intense that it had seemed like stark despair. Was she to have to endure the same all over again later today and tomorrow?

Would he never go away and stay away?

Would she never have the resolve to send him away and mean it?

She had received a card with the morning post from Mrs. Lund, Mr. Blake’s sister, inviting her to join Mr. Lund and herself at the theater next week. Mr. Blake was to be of the party too, she had added. Although Frances had hesitated, she had written back to accept. Life had to continue, she had reasoned. And perhaps now she would finally be able to put the past behind her and concentrate her attention upon the man who seemed eager to be her beau. It was not as if she had to make any final decision about him yet. She did not even have to tell him everything about herself yet. It was merely an evening at the theater to which she had been invited.

She had congratulated herself—again—upon her good sense. But here she was, just a few hours later, walking in Sydney Gardens with Lucius Marshall—who was soon to marry a Miss Portia Hunt.

“For someone who had something important to say,” she said, breaking a lengthy silence, “and who was granted merely one hour of my time, you are remarkably silent, Lord Sinclair.”

They walked onto a brightly painted and exquisitely carved Chinese bridge and paused for a few moments to gaze down into the slate-gray waters of the canal below. Under different circumstances, she was half aware, she would be feasting her senses on all the beauty that surrounded them, inclement weather notwithstanding.

“Do you believe in fate, Frances?” he asked her.

She considered her answer. Did she?

“I do believe in coincidence,” she said. “I believe that some unexpected things happen to catch our attention, and that what we do with those moments might affect or change the whole course of our life. But I do not believe we are blown about helplessly by a fate over which we have no control. There would be no point in free will if that were so. We all have the power to decide, to say yes or no, to do something or not to do it, to go in this direction or that.”

“Do you believe,” he asked her, “that the whole course of your life brought you to that snow-clogged road when it did, and that the whole course of my life brought me to the same place at the same time? And do you believe that coincidence as you call it willed it so? Or that in some quite unconscious way we did ourselves? Was it perhaps not simple, random accident that it was you who were there and not some other woman, or that it was me and not some other man?”

The strange, unlikely possibility made her feel breathless. Could life really be that . . . deliberate?

“You were warned that it would snow,” she said. “You might have chosen not to travel that day. I had seen all the signs of an approaching storm for days. I might have waited to see what would happen.”

“Precisely,” he said. “Either one of us or both could have heeded the warnings and warning signs, which appear to have deterred every other intended traveler in that area. But neither of us did. Has it struck you as curious that we met no one else on that road? That no one else stopped at that inn?”

No, it had not. She had never thought of it. But she thought of it now. She had wanted to set out earlier that morning, but her great-aunts had persuaded her to sit an extra hour with them over breakfast. If she had left when she had intended, she would very probably never have met him.

How she wished she had set out earlier!

Or did she?

What was he trying to say, anyway?

He set out along the path again, and she fell into step beside him. He did not offer his arm. He had not done so since they left the school, in fact. She was thankful for it. But she did not need to touch him in order to feel him with every fiber of her being.

Was it possible, she wondered, that it was not just the fact that she had lain with him that drew her so powerfully to him, that had made it impossible to forget him, that had made her life an agony during the past few days? She had loved before. Surely she had loved Charles. But she had never felt quite like this.

They walked onward in silence again. They still had not encountered anyone else since entering Sydney Gardens. Everyone else in Bath had more sense than they, it seemed.

When they reached the top of the hill, they paused again to look down on trees and lawns and winding paths. A roofed pavilion was in view to the left. So was the famed labyrinth a little lower down. Maps of the maze were available from the Sydney Hotel beside the entrance to the Gardens, Frances had heard, for use by those too afraid of getting lost for an indeterminate length of time before finding their way out again. Behind them was a row of swings, one of them creaking in the wind.

There were all the signs of the fact that these were pleasure gardens, not least among them the sheer beauty of nature. Yet she felt the very antithesis of joy as she looked on them all. Where was this hour leading them? It was leading absolutely nowhere at all.

His silence unnerved her, though she had sworn to herself that she would not break it again. But when she looked across at him, she found him looking back, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.

His words took her totally by surprise.

“Do those swings beckon you as strongly as they do me?” he asked her.

What? For a moment her mind was catapulted back to the inn kitchen on the first morning they spent there, when they were eating breakfast and he had suddenly challenged her to a snowman-building contest. That, she realized then—yes, just that—had been the real start of everything between them. If she had refused . . .

She turned her head to look at the swings. The broad wooden seats were suspended from tree branches overhead on long, plaited ropes. Because they were set in a grove of trees, they looked as if they were sheltered from the wind. Only the one swing at the far end swayed and creaked.

“Even more strongly,” she said, and she turned, catching up the hems of her dress and cloak as she did so, and strode toward the nearest swing.

The need to break the terrible tension between them was overwhelming. What more sure way than to frolic on a child’s swing?

“Do you need a push?” he asked as she seated herself.

“Of course not,” she said, pushing off with both feet and then stretching out her legs and bending them back under the seat to set her swing in motion and propel herself higher and higher. “And I bet I’ll be first to kick the sky.”

“Ah, a challenge,” he said, taking the swing next to hers. “Did no one ever teach you that it is unladylike to make wagers?”

“That is a rule imposed by men because they are afraid of losing to women,” she said.

“Ha!”

They swung higher and higher until the ropes of their swings creaked in protest and the wind whipped at her skirts and the brim of her bonnet and fairly took her breath away on the forward descent and ascent. With every upward swing Frances could see more and more of the gardens below. With every downward swoop she was aware of tree branches rushing by only a few feet away.