Finally, Alinor looked up at him and he saw that her eyes were darkened with unshed tears. “I wouldn’t stoop to marry a man who’d kill his own child,” she said simply. “It’s not an honor that you offer me. If you’re the man who’d destroy his own baby in the womb then you’re not the man that I thought you were, and you’re not the man for me.”

He was as shaken as if she had slapped his handsome face. “Don’t you dare to judge me!” he burst out.

She shook her head, quite unafraid. “I don’t judge you. I’m just telling you that I agree with you. You won’t have me with the baby that I carry; I won’t come to you without it. We’re both losers, I think.”

She rose from her chair, and at once he got to his feet and put his hand on her arm. “You can’t go like this!”

“I can’t stay,” she replied quietly.

“I mean . . .” He meant that he could not believe that she could defy him, that she could turn down his wealth and name and love. He could not believe that she could refuse him, and prefer such a little thing—not even a baby yet—a homunculus that had barely quickened. It was a nothing, it was a nothing, less than a hen’s egg that he might eat for his breakfast, and yet she was putting it between them. It was not possible to imagine that she should choose a life of poverty and shame with a fatherless child over the comfort and wealth that he could offer her, and his name, his pride and his name.

“But I love you!” he burst out.

There was a world of sadness in the smile that she turned on him. “Oh, I love you,” she replied. “I always will. And I’ll take a comfort in that, when you’re gone away to your beautiful house and I’m here alone.”

Without another word, she turned and walked away from him, just as if he were not a young gentleman, and the son of a great man, just as if he were not the greatest prospect of her life: a husband of unimaginable wealth and position, and her savior from shame. She walked away from him without looking back. She walked away from him as if she were never coming back, and she left him alone at the table laid with breakfast in the best coaching inn of Chichester.

Alinor went home in a dream, setting one foot before the other. She did not hail any passing cart for a lift. There was only one that went by her, and she did not see or hear it. As she walked, it started to snow, little specks of white snow like a dust that whirled around her, and she pulled up the hood of her cloak and let it settle on her head and her shoulders. She could not feel cold; she did not know that it was snowing.