But was there any point in walking out with her yet again? To try to persuade her once more that life with him was preferable to the life she could expect here? To ask her again to marry him? She would say no again and would keep on saying no as many times as he asked.
What he should do was go back to the house, have his things packed, and set out on his return journey to London. There was no point in staying longer. He was wasting his time, deluding himself with false hope. He was harassing her and behaving dishonorably toward her.
And yet there were her eyes. They told him every time they looked into his that she was unhappy. She was unhappy to see him, she told him. She had been happy before he came. She would be happy again after he left. He did not believe it. He could not believe it. Because it was a look of something more than just unhappiness. He could only describe it to himself as a look of yearning.
She looked at him with unhappiness and yearning. Yearning for what? For him to go away and leave her in peace? But that would be a look of anger, not of yearning.
No, he could not give up. Not yet. He would stay for a week longer, anyway. Perhaps two.
He left the woods and wandered down the sloping lawn to the wrought-iron gates that led to nothing except the sand dunes beyond. He had never been through the gates. The dunes and the beach and the sea did not invite him. He had always been inexplicably afraid of the sea, even though he was a strong swimmer and enjoyed boating on rivers. There was something too vast, too far beyond human understanding about the sea.
But this morning he opened the gates and followed his eager collie through them and up onto the grass-strewn dunes to gaze out over the beach. It was vast this morning. The tide was out. He shuddered at the same time as he felt an unwilling pull to the power and majesty of it all. Wales, he decided, or the little he had seen of it, was a wild and empty land, and yet there was something about it—something that tugged at the emotions. He was reminded for no apparent reason of the Welsh folk song Katherine had sung in his drawing room.
The Welsh were an emotional and a passionate people, he had heard. Perhaps those feelings had come from the country itself, from the rugged landscape and from the sea, which seemed to dominate everything. The country was surrounded by it on three sides.
Patch had run back and forth across the sand dunes for a while and then ran down onto the beach and turned to look up at him with an eager, intelligent face and cocked ears and wagging tail.
“Well,” he said, “just for a short while, I suppose. I dread to think of the massacre I am about to commit against my boots, but I will have you to blame.” He chuckled.
But before he could reach the bottom of the dune, the collie had turned, become even more alert, and gone streaking off toward the distant line of water. He set his fingers to his mouth to whistle her back, and then spotted the distant dot of a human figure.
It was impossible to know with his eyes that it was she. But he knew it with his heart. He felt no doubt at all. He stood still for a moment longer. He was not sure he could face another meeting with her just yet—and in such bleak surroundings. And she must have come here herself to be sure of being quite alone. He would, of course, be the person she most wanted to avoid.
But he must see her again. He must speak with her again. He must try to find the words with which to persuade her. Perhaps if he failed now he would cut short his visit after all. Perhaps he would set out for London tomorrow morning. Or perhaps even this afternoon.
He finished his descent and strode across the beach in pursuit of his dog, and in pursuit of his own dream.
She did not say anything when he drew close and stopped, a few feet away from her. She looked at him, but she would not break the silence. He was not wearing a hat this morning, she noticed. He had learned some wisdom at least during his week in this part of the world.
He said nothing either for a while. Perhaps they would stand and stare at each other all morning, she thought.
“Shall we walk?” he asked eventually, gesturing along the beach in the direction she had been taking. His collie bounded to its feet, alerted by the word walk, and made off ahead of them.
She fell into step beside him. There was no point in arguing this point, at least. They walked for a while in silence. His Hessians were flecked with sand, she noted with some satisfaction.
“Tell me why you hate me,” he said eventually.
She looked away, toward the sea.
“Is it because of Hastings?” he asked. “Do you blame me for spoiling your life? Did you know that he finally married an heiress four years ago, squandered all she had, and then abandoned her to run off to Italy with someone else?”
“No,” she said without looking at him, “I did not know.”
“But you still blame me?” he said. “You think it might have turned out differently if you had married him?”
“No,” she said, “I am sure it would not have.”
“But you hate me anyway,” he said, “for stopping your flight, for exposing his avarice to you and causing him to leave you?”
“I have not thought of Lieutenant Hastings since coming here,” she said. “I have no interest in thinking of him now.”
“Why, then?” he asked her. “Why do you hate me so implacably? Is it because I so lost control that one night? I should have begged your pardon immediately afterward, or at the very latest the next morning. But somehow it seemed woefully inadequate to say I was sorry. And so I said nothing.”
“Were you?” she said. “Sorry, I mean?”
“More sorry than I can say,” he said. “Although I did not realize at the time that you would have the folly to refuse me when we had returned to London, it was still unpardonable of me to do what I did. What happened between us should have happened for the first time in our marriage bed.”
She turned her head more sharply away from him and watched one weak breaker gradually whiten into foam as it fought the ebb tide. The tide must be just about on the turn.
