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“Yet you left here,” she said.

“Yet I left.” His leaving had had nothing to do with the place, though he had always told himself he was less comfortable here than he was at Elm Court. That had been an unconscious case of self-deception. His leaving had had everything to do with his father, whom he had forgiven with his head and part of his heart, but not with the other part. His childhood had been too painful, his father too guilty. Had that situation changed over the years? He considered the question as he and Stephanie walked on in silence again. Yes, he rather thought it had. Nothing had changed with the facts, and nothing would ever erase the memories, but a life thoughtfully lived brought more maturity with each passing year and an understanding of the imperfections in both one’s own nature and behavior and those of others. Pure black and pure white were both illusions, both a lack of color. Meanwhile, the world teemed with all the colors of the rainbow and myriad shades of those colors.

“If you have enough breath left,” he said as they approached the hills, “we will go up a short way and sit under the shade of a tree with a good view. The wildflowers are thicker on the slope than they are down here, and there are insects galore, including bees. But I have always found that if I leave them alone, they have very little interest in me. I have never yet been stung by a bee. Nor has anyone with me.”

“I will stay close to you, then,” she said, and he noticed that color flared in her cheeks when she realized just what she had said.

“This hillside is a carpet of blue in the springtime,” he said when they stopped halfway up one of the hills at a spot where they were surrounded by trees but had an unobstructed view over park and countryside and farmland. “And before that, a carpet of yellow with the wild daffodils. I was about to add that it is a shame it is so far from the house, but perhaps that is the best thing about it. So much of nature gets dominated by humanity, as if it had been created just for our pleasure. Sometimes—probably most of the time—nature ought not to be organized into gardens and beds or controlled with scythes and clippers. And no, I am not an anarchist or a hater of cultivated gardens. But I do recognize the shortcomings of our species, not the least of which is our assumption that we are superior.”

“It is ironic, then,” she said, “that I always saw you as superior.”

“It hurt,” he said quietly. “Let me spread my coat for you to sit on.”

“It is unnecessary,” she said, arranging her skirt and sitting before he could take off his coat. He sat beside her on the cool, springy grass and tried to identify the dominant aroma. Grass? Clover? Earth? Some combination of them all and at least a dozen other things? There was the hum of insects going about the business of their lives all around them. A few birds trilled and chirruped in the trees.

They sat in the shade of a tree, but one narrow shaft of sunlight shone across her hair.

Sheer gold.

“How long is your hair?” he said.

“Long,” she said.

“It must be glorious when it is down,” he said.

And he watched, fascinated, as she hesitated for a few moments and then lifted her arms and began to remove hairpins. She set them down carefully on one segment of her parasol on the grass beside her. Her hair soon fell in two thick braids over her shoulders and she began to unravel one while he held his breath. She pushed her fingers through it, and the hair spread all about her in thick, luscious ripples all the way to the grass. She did the same to the other braid. Then she clasped her arms about her upraised knees and lowered her forehead to them while he swallowed and tried to keep his breathing under control.

“It is all ruined,” she said in a curiously flat voice.

For a moment he could not fathom what she could possibly mean. But the ends of her hair, perhaps three or four inches of it, were noticeably dry and damaged.

“The dry ends?” he said. “They can be trimmed off, surely. Stephanie, your hair is beautiful beyond words.”

She lifted her head to look at him, her face a mask of fury. “And so cut him away too, cast him away, like so much rubbish?” she said, her voice fierce. “And so forget him as though he were of no account? As though I can lighten the load and move onward and consign him to dust? Can you not see? Can you not understand?”

He gazed at her, appalled and speechless.

The anger died out of her face as quickly as it had come there, leaving her pale. “Of course you do not,” she said. “How could you? You do not know. Nobody knows.”

Tears welled in her eyes, and two spilled over and ran down her cheeks.

Oh God!

“Please don’t upset yourself,” he said, cupping her cheeks with his hands and wiping the tears away with his thumbs.

But she swiped his hands away and buried her face in her hands. Her voice did not sound quite like her own when she spoke, and she was obviously finding it difficult to catch her breath.

“I promised him,” she said. “He said my hair was the loveliest in the whole family, and he said it with all the love inside him beaming from his face, and I loved him and loved him more than anyone in the world. And he made me promise never to cut it, and I promised. And then the world ended. But I never have cut it, no matter what my maid says or Mama or Gwyneth. I have kept my promise.”

She was gasping and weeping and obviously very close to hysteria. He gathered her against him and held her tightly while she cried into her hands and tried to stifle the sounds. Was she talking about…her father? Had this incident she spoke of happened just before his death? Had she been haunted ever since by the memory of the promise?

And then the world ended.

She had kept the promise, and they were surrounded, the two of them, by the heavy golden ripples of her hair and the result of that promise—and the dry, dead ends.

It is all ruined.

She had not been speaking just of her hair, though. What ailed her could not be as easily disposed of as the dry ends of otherwise healthy hair.