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was whispering.
    She tried to pull away, holding her hands against his shoulders. “But I’m not,” she said. “Don’t you see? I don’t belong to you.”
    He was smiling as if he hadn’t heard her. Out of his pocket, he pulled a little package: it was a midnight blue box.
    “What’s this?” she asked.
    “It’s Christmas,” he said. “I’ve brought you a present.”
    She held the box in her hand and looked directly at him. “What is it?”
    “Open it and see.”
    “I must get back.”
    “At least see what I’ve brought you.” She opened the velvet-covered lid. Inside was a thin gold chain, and each link of the chain was shaped like a heart. “Do you like it?”
    She shut the box and held it out to him. “I can’t keep this.”
    He closed his hand over hers. “It shall be our secret.”
    “But don’t you understand? When could I wear it? The girls would see it. What would I say?”
    “Say it’s been left to you by a fond aunt.”
    She looked at him, shook her head. “Perhaps in your world,” she said. “Not in mine.”
    He laughed. “Darling, you
are
my world. Take it, do.”
    She stood trembling; the air was too thick for her to breathe. “I must go away,” she told him.
    “What on earth do you mean?”
    “I shall have to leave. I must go home,” she said.
    He put his head to one side, frowning. “Is someone ill?” he asked. “Is it your mother?”
    “No,” she said. “Not Mother.”
    And her mother’s face was suddenly conjured up. She knew exactly what her mother would say when she went home.
We shan’t be able to be seen in church.
The church was everything; it was what had kept the family together when her father had died. It was the church that made sure they had parish relief. It was the church that gave them food. Nothing was more important, nothing, nothing, nothing, than her mother scrubbing the church steps and sweeping out the rooms of the vicarage and sending her children to the newSunday School, and keeping them clean. Everything had to be clean. The step on the door of their tiny house in a dirty little street. Because it belonged to the church. Because they had to set an example. She and her two brothers and two sisters must go to the church school, eat the church food, clean the church brasses and pews, and arrange their faces to be good children, quiet children. Clean and respectable, their hands clasped in prayer in the back pews, brainwashed to remember whole passages from the Bible. To respect their elders and betters, the churchwardens who kept them from disaster. They were fortunate, her mother always said, to have been saved by kindness when their father died, drowning in the fluid that had filled his lungs. And so very fortunate—so very fortunate—to have been introduced to Mrs. Jocelyn, who was willing to take Emily on because she too was a servant of the church, a regular worshiper when she visited her sister in the town, who had noticed Emily as a good, willing girl.
    She had once told him all this. It had been last summer. The phrase had amused him completely. “A willing girl.” He had drawn her close, to her astonishment and horror.
    “Is there something I can do?” he asked.
    She looked down at the box. “Perhaps you might look after me,” she whispered.
    “Look after you?” he echoed.
    “If I were ill.”
    “But of course,” he said, smiling. “And are you?”
    She couldn’t say the words. They were there in her mouth, but she couldn’t repeat them. “If I…” But they wouldn’t come.
    “But you’re not going to be ill, Emily,” he said. “Not like your father. Not now that you live here.” He kissed her again, looked behind him. “I think you ought to go,” he admitted. “Bradfield and Jocelyn and all that.”
    She gazed into his eyes; he put the box into her hand. “I suppose,” he said, “that I should get you into awful trouble if this went on.”
    “Went on?” she repeated.
    He made a rueful face. “I mean, if