“I am sorry, Lydia,” Harry said.
“Why?” she asked. “You cannot be responsible for what other people say and do, Harry. Neither can I. I believe we have learnedthatin the past few days. And there is no need for you to accompany me, you know, especially as you have guests here to entertain. I believe I can make my way back down the drive without losing my way.”
“Lydia! Have mercy on me,” he said. “My grandmother Westcott—probably both grandmothers, in fact,andall the aunts—would scold me into next week if I did anything as improper as allow a lady to walk home alone.”
She sighed.
“I believe,” she said, “that was exactly how and why all this got started, Harry. First Tom Corning and then you would not hear of my walking home alone. Should I now proceed to ask you if you are ever lonely?”
Harry did not follow her beyond her gate. He did not turn away after she had stepped into her garden and shut the gate, however. He stood against the fence, his hands resting on top of it. She could sense him there and turned when she was halfway along the path, while Snowball curled up into a ball of fluff on the doorstep and waited to be let inside.
“Did I ever give you a definitive answer?” he asked her.
They had talked about a number of things on their way home, but Lydia knew to which question he alluded. It was the one that had come to define their whole relationship.
Are you ever lonely?
She gazed at him and waited.
“It isyes,” he said. His eyes were softly smiling, yet he looked sad, Lydia thought. Just as she was feeling.
“Even now, with all your family surrounding you?” she asked.
He answered with a question of his own. “When you went home to your father’s house,” he said, “were you lonely? Perhaps more so than when you were here?”
“It would be illogical, would it not?” she said. “All those who are closest to me were there—my father, my brothers, my sister-in-law. I live alone here, apart from Snowball.”
“As I do at Hinsford,” he said. “Apart from an army of servants.”
“Yes,” she said after they had gazed at each other in silence for a few moments. “I was lonely.”
“There needs to be a special someone, does there not?” he said. “Or rather … No. There does notneedto be. One ought to be able to live alone. One ought to have all the inner resources to live contentedly with one’s own company. We have to love ourselves, do we not? Or we are incapable of loving anyone else. I think we have both learned those lessons. And we have both been contented and perhaps will be again. But sometimes there is loneliness. And then— sometimes—there is a longing for someone special. Someone to move us from quiet contentment into a warmer happiness. Someone we do notneed, but someone wewantin order to fill in all the blanks in our lives. I am talking a pile of nonsense.”
“No, you are not,” she said, taking a step closer to the fence and then walking right up to it and grasping the top of it, her hands on the outsides of his. “There is a need … Ah, perhaps it is not actually aneed.You are quite right about that. But there is acravingto trust. The loss of it, the loss of the ability to trust, is a terrible thing. It destroys so much. I have come to understand that my life is broken, and I have not been fully able to piece it back together. I dare not trust.”
His eyes continued to smile. And they still looked unhappy. He nodded.
“Harry,” she said. “Tell me I am wrong.”
He shook his head slowly. “Only you can tell yourself that,” he said. “When you are ready.”
“Do you love me?” She gripped the fence more tightly. Oh, her impetuous tongue again. It happened when she was tired. And she was bone weary now. This day had seemed a week long.
“Yes.” The word was so softly spoken that she read his lips more than she heard the sound.
“Am I your someone special?” she asked. “Am I someone you could … cherish?”
“Yes,” he said again.
“I adore you.” She blinked rapidly. She wasnotgoing to become a watering pot again. “And Itrustyou. I have thought about it from every possible angle during the past hour or so, but I cannot talk myself out of trusting you. The trouble with trust, of course, is that it is a future thing, and one can never be certain of anything in the future. One can only … trust. Or not.”
“And you choose to trust me,” he said.
“Yes.” She had blinked back her own tears, but now there were tears swimming in his eyes. “And you are someone I could cherish, Harry. My someone special. Oh, I did not plan any of this. It is most brazen of me. I—”
His hands came down on top of hers and curled around them. “Lydia,” he said. “Istillcannot recall any of my pretty speech except the wordardentand the phrasehappiest of men.But it was a grand piece of pomposity anyway, I daresay.Willyou marry me?” He smiled at her suddenly, leftover tears and all. “Willyou make me the happiest of men? I most ardently love you.”
“Oh, Harry—”
