He put his arms around her and she held his hands in her own. She said, “Oh, confess. Tell me now. Everything.”

“Everything,” he repeated, buying time, and was glad she could not see his face. “Well. Some losses, some gains.” He fought for words. He was a musician not a storyteller, not eloquent. After a long hesitation he said, “I never started a fight. I have not. But I’ve finished a lot of them. This comes from playing in saloons and waterfront dives.” He felt her body between his knees, her narrow shoulders. “They always seem to go for the fiddler.”

“Aye, they do.”

Well, he had got that out of the way. He saw the faint winter wind move the loose wisps of her hair, her black drop earrings. She smelled of citrus and starch and girl. “Needs,” he said. He paused again. “Desires. Also called lust. It can drive a man.” He took several deep breaths through his nostrils. “But from the time I saw you I put this aside, because I knew you would ask me. Because I wanted you.”

“Yes,” she said, and then was silent again.

“I saw people with a mother and a father both when I was growing up and I always wondered, I don’t know, what it would be like. My mother died when I was five, maybe just turned six. My father was a fiddler too and he left my mother before I was born. I was raised by my great-uncle, who is a man I love very much, I respect him very much. He took me in as easy as if I had been born to him. We had the big horse business in Paducah and it was burned down in the war. I think maybe I still own it, what’s left of it. I doubt if even the fences are standing. I was raised with horses and men.” He bent his head down and laid his cheek on her head. “Horses and horsemen and Ohio Valley fiddlers.”

She was silent, holding his hands in a loose and gentle grip. All around them the pecan forest rang with the sound of birds that always flock to water in an arid country, the chirring sound of some animal calling to another of its kind. The spring pool smoked and steamed in the cold.

Finally she said, “You come from good people, Simon.”

“We have done our damnedest. Over time. And so I want to make it up . . . I mean, what I never had. I mean what my mother and father never had. Between them. I want two people to be in love and stay in love and never desert each other. I want this to happen.” He closed his eyes. “I love you. I want you to be with me always.”

He felt near tears.

Then she said quietly, “Simon.”

He said, “I don’t quit.”

“Yes. I know.”

He lifted her hand on the palm of his right one, saw the tiny gold ring on her little finger. “There are of course all the details. But you don’t want to know all the details. If we all knew one another’s lives in all the details nobody would marry anybody.”

She laughed, bending forward. “Nay, ’tis true, all so true.” She leaned back against him. “Someday you will tell me the details. Are there a lot?”

“Yes. There are. And you?”

“Oh dear, yes. We stole Sister Angela’s whiskey and drank it all. Us girls.”

“Doris, you are going to hell.”

“We already did! The next morning I wished I could die. I have rarely touched a drop since then, Simon, it was horrible.”

“What were nuns doing with whiskey?”

He felt her laughter. “They were Irish.”

And then they were simply silent together, thinking of all that had been said, watching the impudent titmice with their dark pointy heads glide down to the water. She had not answered. He knew he must wait, be quiet and wait.

Then she turned to him and laid her warm hand on his thigh without the least idea of the effect it had on him.

“He is coming in the surrey to take us home. We have to get back.”

He stood up, quickly, and her hand slid away.

“And is it better at home?” They made their way along the bank of the spring and then on the return path.

“No, no, I am at my wit’s end. It’s worse than a play at the theater, people flouncing in, flouncing out, screeching. “

“Tell me the rest of it. The details.”

And she told him more, and worse; that she now locked herself in her room, pushed a chair against the doorknob, was never without the company of the girl or Mrs. Webb or Mercedes. She told him about the colonel’s winks and whispers. They well knew what was going on, they did indeed. Simon kept his peace; one more word about doing violence to Webb would silence her on the matter once and for all. And so in revenge the colonel was beginning to cry out in irritation at Doris’s going here and going there to give lessons, to play at receptions, garden parties, musical events, taking Josephina along. That Mrs. Webb had shouted back at him that the girl needed some culture, some education, would he send her to the Catholic nuns, the Papists, at St. Mary’s?

“I could tell you about their arguments, if you like, word for word. I hear them from every place in the house.” She suddenly put a hand over her face, then straightened and wiped her palm on her skirt. “Oh, look at me. I don’t have a handkerchief. I gave it to Jo.”

He took out his own, recently purchased, perfectly clean, and held it out to her. She wiped at her eyes and calmed down, turned her bonnet over and over in her hands. “Maybe it would be best if I went back to Ireland.”

“No,” he said. “God, no.”

“I almost have my fare home. From Galveston to Portsmouth. I would be away from the unhappiness every day, every day.” She put the bonnet on her head and let the ribbons fall untied on her shoulders. Then she was taken up in a struggle not to cry, and she actually wrung her hands together. Simon was so moved by her distress that he could barely speak.

“You have to leave that house.” He put his hand on her cheek. “To somewhere. Even if not with me. What about Mercedes?”

“Yes. I know.” She made that nervous little nod of her head. “She and her husband would take me in if it came to the worst of it.”

“And I have the four hundred acres if I can hold it, and my fiddle and my two hands.”

“If you can hold it?”

“It is in Comanche raiding territory. But it will change. The army is patrolling there now.”

She said, “I am not afraid, Simon. You have no idea what it was like in Ireland.” She made a shooting motion with one hand. “The secret societies shooting the landlord’s men from behind the sheep walls.” She pulled a spiny twig from her skirt. “The landlord’s men are probably worse by far than the Comanches or the Webb household.” She shook out his handkerchief and then tucked it into his coat pocket.

He smiled. “Maybe.”

“At least you are allowed to fight back.”

“I want you safe,” he said. “You will be safe.”

It suddenly occurred to him that traveling by wagon would be a pleasant life, for a while, going from town to town, always a new place to play his fiddle. In his imagination he was riding at the head of two or three wagons, filled with people who could play various instruments. But when the land was paid off, when he had bought a vehicle of some kind and a horse, he would be penniless again and dependent on his music. He was asking her to marry poverty and homeless wandering, at least for the first while and that on a remote frontier. The contrast with these fine homes in San Antonio would be stark.

He looked down in momentary discouragement. Then he remembered that nobody in any of these fine homes had started life with ease. None of them. He lifted his head and reached out to lay his hand along her neck and ran his thumb along the line of her jaw. “Be with me. Stay with me.”

“Simon.” She lifted one hand and placed it on his cheek. “I have never met anyone like you.”

They stood at the base of an enormous cypress whose root system flowed like lava over the stone layers and into the water of San Pedro Springs.

“Make a life with me.” He closed his hand around her wrist.

She took a great long breath of air that sounded as if she were about to plunge headfirst into a pool of cold water. She raised her head to him. “I will, then, Simon.”

He stood with her hands between his, bent to press his forehead against hers, his eyes closed, listening to the whitewings call, listening to them as they fell out of the air and to the water’s edge. Now the trouble would begin.