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“We were a typical family. James was the heir, Michael was the spare—by two minutes, a fact he found affrontingly arbitrary and liked to complain about. He went to the army. I was the third. The spare spare. What else was I to do but prepare for the Church? I had a scholarly bent, too, which helped. And though the life I would have had did not inherently appeal, it felt important, as I said last night.” He shrugged. “I suppose it worked out for the best. As you said yourself, my work in Lords has done, or has the potential to do, more good than looking after a parish.”

“What about all those souls you would have saved?”

He whipped his gaze to hers, and it took a beat for him to realize she was jesting.

He laughed for the second time that evening. She was growing attached to the sound of his laughter.

“I’m going to tell you a scandalous secret, Miss Brown.”

“Oh, good. I can’t think when someone last did that.”

She hadn’t been so free with jesting since before Thea died.

He grew serious. “I do not think most people’s souls need saving.”

“Well, you would have made a very radical vicar, indeed.” She wasn’t jesting anymore, not exactly, but she was endeavoring to sustain the conversation, to keep the mood as it was so he would keep talking.

“There’s a book on the topic I found illuminating. Life-changing, even. I could lend it to you if you’re interested.” He paused. “You probably aren’t. It isn’t nearly as exciting as any novel I’ve read—though of course I have not read many.”

“I am interested,” she said quietly, dropping the teasing.

Something was passing between them. Understanding, to be sure, but it felt like more than that.

He cleared his throat. “All things considered, and speaking purely selfishly, I would rather have stayed the course in seminary, my doubts aside. Despite its lack of inherent appeal, life as a country vicar would have had its consolations, chief among them that it would have been mine. My own life, out from under the …”

“Shadow of your brothers?”

“Something like that.”

Hmm. She had the impression that he’d been going to say something else.

“Something like what?” she pressed, as if she knew him well enough to do so.

He answered her as if he knew her well enough to allow himself to be pressed. Perhaps he did. “If my brothers cast a shadow, it was not their doing. It was my mother’s.”

“You were in earnest when you called yourself the spare spare.”

“I was.”

“I am sorry.”

“She is not an easy woman.”

“But you have an obligation to her.”

“Perhaps,” he said, which she thought an odd response. “Regardless, although I know we aren’t meant to speak of it, I should like to apologize sincerely for shouting at you the night … of the obelisk. It was her behavior I was upset by, and there was no call to punish you for it.”

“Thank you for that, but I do think we are even in terms of appalling behavior, so please let this be the final time we speak of it.”

“Not even in code?” he teased.

“I’m sure I haven’t talked about obelisks so much in my entire life as I have these recent days.”

He chuckled. “Do you remember, in Pride and Prejudice, when, after Elizabeth rebuffs Mr. Collins’s suit, everyone is surprised when Charlotte Lucas turns up engaged to him?”

It took Diantha a moment to shift to the apparent change in topic, but after a beat, she said, “I do.”

“Charlotte explains herself to her friend by saying she isn’t a romantic.”