“Sometimes,” he said, “it is easier to confide in a sympathetic stranger than in a friend or relative.”

“Is that what you are?” She glanced at him again and he noticed that her face had caught the sun and would be unfashionably bronzed for a while.

“A sympathetic stranger?” he said. “Yes. And have you noticed that people will admit to almost any vice or shortcoming before they will admit to loneliness? It is as if there were something rather shameful in the condition.”

“I am lonely,” she said quickly and rather breathlessly. “Terribly lonely. And yes, it does seem shameful. It also seems ungrateful. I have my son.”

“Who is busy forging his own life in company with other children,” he said.

“A dreadful thing just happened,” she said in a rush. “It is why I was walking here alone. Everyone was leaving the beach, and without thinking I held out my hand to take David’s-I sometimes forget he is no longer an infant. He said, ‘Oh, Mama!’ and dashed off to walk with Joshua, who ruffled his hair and set a hand on his shoulder and talked to him even though his own son was riding on his shoulders. Neither of them meant to be cruel-Joshua had not even seen what had happened. It was ridiculous of me to feel hurt. There were any number of other children and other adults to whom I might have attached myself for the walk back to the house. But I felt very alone and very frightened. How can I compete for my son’s affections with other children and men who are willing to give him their attention? And why would I want to? I am glad for him. And I hate my own pettiness.”

Ah, yes, Sydnam thought, he had been very wrong about her. Her beauty counted for nothing in the life that had been mapped out for her and that was slowly and inexorably changing as her son grew older. He wondered briefly about the man who had fathered her child. What had happened to him? Why had she not married him? More to the point, perhaps, why had he not married her?

“No one,” he said decisively, “can or ever will be able to compete with you, Miss Jewell. You are the boy’s mother. He relies upon you for love and comfort and support and security and approval. And in some ways he always will. No one could ever replace my own mother in my heart for the things I look for from her. But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.”

“But I have my friends,” she protested.

“I do too,” he told her. “I have been here for five years and have made friends, some of them quite close, on whom I can call at any time and with whom I can talk comfortably on any subject under the sun. I have a family in Hampshire-mother, father, brother, sister-in-law-who love me dearly and would do anything in the world for me.”

She had not mentioned family of her own, he noticed-except her son.

“But you are lonely?”

“But I am lonely,” he admitted, turning his head so that he could see the sun shining on the cliff face, making it more silver than gray, and on the deep blue sky above.

He did not believe he had ever said those words aloud before-even to himself. But they were, of course, starkly true.

“Thank you,” she said unexpectedly. She drew breath as if to say something else, but she did not speak.

Thank you? And yet he felt a certain gratitude to her too. She had asked if he was lonely and then admitted her own loneliness and given him a glimpse into the insecurities of her life. She had bound them in the common human experience of pain and uncertainty, as if there were nothing peculiar and pathetic about his own.

So many people saw him as an object of pity that it had always taken more than usual fortitude not to pity himself-and he had not always been successful, especially at the beginning. He did not pity himself in his loneliness. It was just a fact of his life to which he had adjusted-if one ever adjusted to loneliness.

“I had better go back,” she said. “After I have been away from David for an hour or two, my heart yearns for him-and what a foolish way of expressing myself. Thank you for walking with me, Mr. Butler. This has been a pleasant half hour.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “if your son is well occupied with the other children and you feel somewhat uncomfortable with being a houseguest here, you would care to walk with me again some other time, Miss Jewell. Perhaps…Well, never mind.” He felt suddenly, horribly embarrassed.

“I would,” she said quickly.

“Would you?” He stopped and turned to look at her, deliberately presenting her with a full-face view of himself. “Tomorrow, perhaps? At the same time? Do you know where I live? The cottage?”

“The pretty thatched one close to the gates?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Will you walk that way tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said.

They looked at each other, and he noticed her teeth sinking into her lower lip.

“Tomorrow, then,” she said, and turned and hurried away barefoot across the sand in the direction of the cliff path.

He watched her go.

…after I have been away from David for an hour or two, my heart yearns for him.

She had apologized for the sentimentality of the words, spoken of her son. But they echoed in his mind and for a moment he indulged in a waking fantasy without even the excuse of sleep.

What if those words had been spoken of him, Sydnam Butler, instead of David?

…my heart yearns for him.

The Reverend Charles Lofter and his wife drove into the nearby village the next morning to pay their respects to the vicar. They took Mrs. Thompson and their children with them, including ten-year-old Alexander. The Duchess of Bewcastle went calling upon some neighbors with Lord and Lady Aidan, who had met them during a previous visit to Wales. Davy and Becky went too, though both her grace’s baby and Lady Aidan’s two-year-old daughter, Hannah, remained in the nursery.

Both groups invited David Jewell to accompany them, but he chose to remain behind. Anne found him in the nursery, playing good-naturedly with several of the younger children, who were squabbling fiercely over which of them was to ride on his back next.

“It is Laura’s turn,” he was telling Daniel, “and then Miranda’s.”

One of Lord Alleyne’s young twins climbed triumphantly on and David crawled across the floor with her, bucking and neighing a couple of times as he went and causing her to squeal and giggle and grasp him more tightly about the neck while Lord Rannulf’s Miranda and the other children jumped up and down in anticipation of their next turn.

Ten minutes later he announced that the horse needed its oats and came toward Anne, his hair tousled, his face flushed, his eyes sparkling and happy.

“They wanted me to stay,” he explained, “and so I did.”

“That was good of you,” she said, pushing back an errant lock of hair from his forehead. Almost immediately it fell back into place again, as it always did. She realized how much it meant to her son, who had always been very much the youngest of all the pupils at the school in Bath, to be the older hero to the little children.

“I am going to play cricket with everyone again this afternoon,” he said. “Cousin Joshua is teaching me to bowl.”

Cousin Joshua? For a moment Anne felt angry. She had never wanted to acknowledge that relationship between the Marquess of Hallmere and her son, much as she was fond of Joshua and much as she appreciated all he had done for her and continued to do. But she curbed her first instinct, which was to instruct her son rather sharply to call Joshua Lord Hallmere. Calling him Cousin Joshua had clearly not been David’s idea.

“And are you good at it?” Anne asked.