“I’m dressed,” he said. “Are you satisfied?”

Her dark eyes in her pale face were huge. “No,” she said quietly. “I am longing for you again, already. But we have to be ready to face the world and the day.”

He heard the echo of Zachary in the back of his mind: that she was a woman that no man could ever satisfy. He shook his head. “Where will you go?” he asked, as if she had anywhere to go but the poor fisherman’s cottage.

“Home.”

“I shall stay here for a few days and then I will have to go to London and then to my seminary,” he told her, trusting her with his secrets as he had trusted her with his sin. “But, Alinor, my love, it is all changed for me. I have lost my faith and failed in my mission. I have to go and tell them that, and I will have to confess, and then, I suppose, I shall have to leave. I will have to beg them to release me.”

She looked alarmed. “You have to confess? You have to speak of this?”

He grimaced. “These are mortal sins. I have broken so many of my vows. I have to confess. My loss of faith is worse than this, but I have to confess this too and face my punishment.”

“Will they punish me too?” she asked.

He could have laughed at her ignorance. “I won’t say your name,” he assured her. “They won’t even know where you live. They cannot report you.”

“D’you have to speak of us?”

“I have to make a full confession, great sins and lesser.”

She wondered which was the greater sin and which the lesser. But she did not ask. She would not have claimed her own importance. “If you confess to them, mightn’t they keep you there?”

“I don’t think they will want me,” he said desolately. “I have failed in everything they sent me to do. And I have lost my faith as well.”

“But even so, mightn’t they keep you? Can they keep you? Can they make you stay there? Can they lock you up?”

“They would not keep me against my will, I know that. But they will make it very difficult to leave. They will have to be convinced that I am sure. I can never go back, you see. If I leave, I can never return. They will see this as a betrayal of my duty and of my faith. And they have been father and mother and schoolmaster to me as well as my way to God. They will be sorry, as I am sorry.”

She looked very grave. “You are sorry?”

“But I will come back to you.”

The flush on her face told him what that meant to her, but she shook her head. “Don’t come back for me,” she said quietly. “This has been everything to me, but you can’t come back here for me. I’m not fit for you. I couldn’t live in your world, and you’d never live in mine.”