“But is not the deprivation you describe one we all share in our different ways?” She shook her head with a surprising vehemence. He realized he had touched some deep emotion in her.

“I meant only to suggest that social privilege does not necessarily bring happiness.”

“There is no likeness between a situation where happiness is at least possible and one where…” again she shook her head.

“But you surely can’t pretend that all governesses are unhappy—or remain unmarried?”

“All like myself.”

He left a silence, then said, “I interrupted your story. Forgive me.”

“And you will believe I speak not from envy?”

She turned then, her eyes intense, and he nodded. Plucking a little spray of milkwort from the bank beside her, blue flowers like microscopic cherubs’ genitals, she went on.

“Varguennes recovered. It came to within a week of the time when he should take his leave. By then he had declared his attachment to me.”

“He asked you to marry him?”

She found difficulty in answering. “There was talk of marriage. He told me he was to be promoted captain of a wine ship when he returned to France. That he had expectations of recovering the patrimony he and his brother had lost.” She hesitated, then came out with it. “He wished me to go with him back to France.”

“Mrs. Talbot was aware of this?”

“She is the kindest of women. And the most innocent. If Captain Talbot had been there… but he was not. I was ashamed to tell her in the beginning. And afraid, at the end.” She added, “Afraid of the advice I knew she must give me.” She began to defoliate the milkwort. “Varguennes became insistent. He made me believe that his whole happiness depended on my accompanying him when he left—more than that, that my happiness depended on it as well. He had found out much about me. How my father had died in a lunatic asylum. How I was without means, without close relatives. How for many years I had felt myself in some mysterious way condemned—and I knew not why—to solitude.” She laid the milkwort aside, and clenched her fingers on her lap. “My life has been steeped in loneliness, Mr. Smithson. As if it has been ordained that I shall never form a friendship with an equal, never inhabit my own home, never see the world except as the generality to which I must be the exception. Four years ago my father was declared bankrupt. All our possessions were sold. Ever since then I have suffered from the illusion that even things—mere chairs, tables, mirrors—conspire to increase my solitude. You will never own us, they say, we shall never be yours. But always someone else’s. I know this is madness, I know in the manufacturing cities poverties and solitude exist in comparison to which I live in comfort and luxury. But when I read of the Unionists’ wild acts of revenge, part of me understands. Almost envies them, for they know where and how to wreak their revenge. And I am powerless.” Something new had crept into her voice, an intensity of feeling that in part denied her last sentence. She added, more quietly, “I fear I don’t explain myself well.”

“I’m not sure that I can condone your feelings. But I understand them perfectly.”

“Varguennes left, to take the Weymouth packet. Mrs. Talbot supposed, of course, that he would take it as soon as he arrived there. But he told me he should wait until I joined him. I did not promise him. On the contrary—I swore to him that. .. but I was in tears. He said finally he should wait one week. I said I would never follow him. But as one day passed, and then another, and he was no longer there to talk to, the sense of solitude I spoke of just now swept back over me. I felt I would drown in it, far worse, that I had let a spar that might have saved me drift out of reach. I was overcome by despair. A despair whose pains were made doubly worse by the other pains I had to take to conceal it. When the fifth day came, I could endure it no longer.”

“But I gather all this was concealed from Mrs. Talbot—were not your suspicions aroused by that? It is hardly the conduct of a man with honorable intentions.”

“Mr. Smithson, I know my folly, my blindness to his real character, must seem to a stranger to my nature and circumstances at that time so great that it cannot be but criminal. I can’t hide that. Perhaps I always knew. Certainly some deep flaw in my soul wished my better self to be blinded. And then we had begun by deceiving. Such a path is difficult to reascend, once engaged upon.”

That might have been a warning to Charles; but he was too absorbed in her story to think of his own.

“You went to Weymouth?”

“I deceived Mrs. Talbot with a tale of a school friend who had fallen gravely ill. She believed me to be going to Sherborne. Both journeys require one to go to Dorchester. Once there, I took the omnibus to Weymouth.”

But Sarah fell silent then and her head bowed, as if she could not bring herself to continue.

“Spare yourself, Miss Woodruff. I can guess—”

She shook her head. “I come to the event I must tell. But I do not know how to tell it.” Charles too looked at the ground. In one of the great ash trees below a hidden missel thrush was singing, wild-voiced beneath the air’s blue peace. At last she went on. “I found a lodging house by the harbor. Then I went to the inn where he had said he would take a room. He was not there. But a message awaited me, giving the name of another inn. I went there. It was not… a respectable place. I knew that by the way my inquiry for him was answered. I was told where his room was and expected to go up to it. I insisted he be sent for. He came down. He seemed overjoyed to see me, he was all that a lover should be. He apologized for the humbleness of the place. He said it was less expensive than the other, and used often by French seamen and merchants. I was frightened and he was very kind. I had not eaten that day and he had food prepared…”

She hesitated, then went on, “It was noisy in the common rooms, so we went to a sitting room. I cannot tell you how, but I knew he was changed. Though he was so attentive, so full of smiles and caresses, I knew that if I hadn’t come he would have been neither surprised nor long saddened. I knew then I had been for him no more than an amusement during his convalescence. The veil before my eyes dropped. I saw he was insincere… a liar. I saw marriage with him would have been marriage to a worthless adventurer. I saw all this within five minutes of that meeting.” As if she heard a self-recriminatory bitterness creep into her voice again, she stopped; then continued in a lower tone. “You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it. I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman’s house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.”

She stared out to sea for a moment. Charles fancied a deeper pink now suffused her cheeks, but her head was turned away.

“In such circumstances I know a… a respectable woman would have left at once. I have searched my soul a thousand times since that evening. All I have found is that no one explanation of my conduct is sufficient. I was first of all as if frozen with horror at the realization of my mistake—and yet so horrible was it… I tried to see worth in him, respectability, honor. And then I was filled with a kind of rage at being deceived. I told myself that if I had not suffered such unendurable loneliness in the past I shouldn’t have been so blind. Thus I blamed circumstances for my situation. I had never been in such a situation before. Never in such an inn, where propriety seemed unknown and the worship of sin as normal as the worship of virtue is in a nobler building. I cannot explain. My mind was confused. Perhaps I believed I owed it to myself to appear mistress of my destiny. I had run away to this man. Too much modesty must seem absurd… almost a vanity.” She paused. “I stayed. I ate the supper that was served. I drank the wine he pressed on me. It did not intoxicate me. I think it made me see more clearly… is that possible?”