-OO-

The snow had thawed yesterday, but there had been a frost overnight which kept the grass crisp, a sparkle dancing by as the bright winter sun passed. They walked quickly along the path up the hill, passing the cemetery and the graves –

"Poor Mr Boucher and his wife," Margaret said, stopping by the place the unfortunate man and his wife had been laid in the earth. "What a sad, terrible life he had."

Thornton stood quietly beside her. "Nicholas Higgins is doing a good job of raisin' his littl'uns. I could not do that, not for such a weak man as Boucher, and yet Boucher's children are more than he was. The littlest, Tom, is advanced for his age."

"I heard you were taking an interest in his education," Margaret said, "I felt so glad of it," and Mr Thornton's eye flickered her way.

"I thought you'd not disagree with me that the boy deserves more than a future chasin' cotton scraps around my mill," he observed dryly.

"But do they not all deserve more than that – all children?"

He took his time to reply, "Are you sayin, Miss Hale, that special consideration should not be given for a natural ability?"

"No," she replied with some spirit, "but you seem to be saying that only intelligent children deserve to be spared the drudge of harsh labour."

He gave a half-smile, his eyes slanting sideways to her face. "You could turn that on its head an' declare that clever children must be deprived the chance of helping ease their family's situation, forced into schoolin' while they see their stupider brothers and sisters place food on the table. But come Miss Hale, let's speak of lighter things..." he did not want to argue with her, and she seemed lively today, sharper. "See there – " from the crest of the hill he pointed her to the bridge – "there's the Irish Maid, just passin' now - she was laden to the gunnels yesterday with bales of woven cotton from Marlborough Mill, bound for Liverpool – and then, who knows - Ireland, Africa?"

Her eyes on his face, she quoted softly, "Might she bring back marmosets from Mozambique?"

He grasped it immediately: "You remember that, do you?" It was a sour memory for him; his rejected proposal fresh and bitter in his mind and in hers, unexpectedly meeting and unprepared for it, they had viciously snapped at one another - and her dislikeable friend Lennox had tried (and failed) to humiliate him, thinking him a lumpwit trader. Well, he had put the man straight on that. Left Lennox looking like the fool. Margaret had tried to speak as he turned away, but he had shrugged her off and strode angrily away, raw with it all.

"I could not forget it," she was replying to him, smiling. "You spoke so well to your audience, so commandingly. They were impressed by your passionate defence of industry."

"That's not what I remember," he said, after a pause.

I certainly do not think that... as Mr Thornton could tell you, if he would know me at all
I have presumed to know you once before, and have been mistaken

He risked a glance at her; her beauty so entranced him. Her clear, luminous skin – her astonishing, guileless eyes set in her lovely face, unwaveringly on him. It broke over him so painfully.

If only she loved me. I would love her so well.

"Have you had your fill of boats and barges, Miss Hale? We should return – you will be catching cold." He was muffled up in a long dark woollen greatcoat while hers looked thin; he wondered if he should offer it to her – fold it around her shoulders, and warm her, by this acceptable means passing the heat from his own body to hers, but knew he could not – even such a small thing too intimate for this delicate, frozen creature who had never wanted him near.

"Stay a little longer," she said. "Look at the sky, Mr Thornton. The colour of it."

It was the most vivid shade of blue today, the milky haze of earlier cleared away, and the grass so green, tipped with white frost. Birds, grown used to these two still, inoffensive humans, had resumed their spiky little tunes from nearby trees. The sight of barges moving through water, and the far-off shouts of men. She looked raptly at it all, filling her soul with it, inhaling clean, fresh air.

"We must come up here again, Mr Thornton!" she exclaimed. "It is exhilarating, do you not think so?" She looked happy as he had rarely seen her, glowing with the cold and the joy of it all.

He said, frowningly, "If only we might have spent more time walkin' like this, admirin' the colour of sky. Looking at nature in its seasons. Just looking, and talking. Things might have been different. Instead, we were always on some battleground or other."

He would have caught the words back if he could. He had said too much, and now her joy had gone.

She said, "I have been so often unkind to you, and so often difficult. And yet, you do so much for me, Mr Thornton. I don't know why."

His eyes, creasing up with his surprise, sought out hers, held them. "You do know why?" he said, with a little, quizzical tilt of his head.

It was another of those keystone moments. Now every noise had vanished as if pulled away into another space; even the birdsong seemed to cease, so lost were these two people in each other.

She took a little step closer... breathed in a deep breath. "I did not know... if you still felt that way." There was a pause in which he did not say anything, his sharp blue-gray eyes resting frowningly on her face, a strung-out silence which alarmed her and made words tumble out, "I meant...I didn't know if you still felt the way you did when you once told me you had feelings for me." Another pause, deeper and longer than the last. "Only recently you said you did not. You were quite clear that those feelings had died. So I wondered - but I think I have mistaken what you meant, Mr Thornton, and have misspoken." She was all confusion now, embarrassed almost to the point of distress.

"No, no!" he said quickly. "You understood me very well. I'm sorry, I had no thought in me to confuse you so - to make you feel you've said something out of place – you have not. I was only quiet for not knowing what next to say."

"You said just now, 'things might have been different,'" she said. "As if it was over."

"It will never be over for me," he said. "However long the world turns, I will always feel this way."

And so, here on a bright, cold hillside high above the smoking Milton chimneys, for the second time John Thornton made his declaration of love to Margaret Hale. He had not even seen it coming, had not known that he would speak it aloud this way – the words had seemed to burst forth from a place inside him without ever pausing to consult his sense.

Ashen-pale, he added with deep, heartfelt emotion, "Please know, Miss Hale, I make no demands on you. I will never embarrass you again as I once did." He was actually trembling, a fine vibration running through him like a quivering thread drawn out slowly on a spindle, but the coat would hide most of it. It was all lost now, even friendship. After this, she would have to keep him away.

She stepped forward, she took his hands in hers. "You are shaking, Mr Thornton."

How sweet was her lovely face, lifted to his. Of course she would be kind.

He withdrew his hands. Stepped back. "We have been out in the cold too long. I must get you back to Marlborough House."

"Mr Thornton!" she cried, refusing to move. "If you feel still as you did a year ago – then it is time you knew that I –I - " her head dropped down, then lifted, and she faced him determinedly. "It has been a long time, months since I have known and understood the honour you did me on that day. You offered me your heart and yourself. You risked everything opening yourself to me and then what you must have feared most to happen, did happen. I turned you down in the cruellest way, I told you I did not like you. And almost since that day I have regretted it. I have wanted to take those words back over and over. How I have longed for a kind glance from you, to give me the chance to try to speak what is in my heart - that I do like you, I more than like you, I –" she stopped, then resumed more quietly, " but it did not happen. You had seen me with Frederick and now you thought of me with contempt, you thought you had had a lucky escape. Is that not so, Mr Thornton?"

That made him speak, at last:

"No, I never thought that. Never thought of a 'lucky escape'."

Now he saw she was trembling. He opened his great coat and wrapped it around her, because it was all right to now, though he wasn't sure why.

His warm body pressed to hers, the coat made a cosiness around them in the biting air. They had been this close only once before, and that in the most unhappy circumstances. Her body was so sweet, womanly, firm and soft all at once. All his senses, so tightly ruled for so long, rushed out to overwhelm him.

"Oh Margaret," he whispered, "Tell me, what are you sayin? I am having such trouble making sense of it."

She had allowed herself to nestle against him. He could feel her breath, warm on his face as she looked up at him. "Be a man, Mr Thornton," she whispered, as she had urged him once before. "Be brave for us both. Give us another chance to set right what we have so badly played, between us."

Her cheeks were cold, but her lips were warm. His joy met her frozen soul, and overwhelmed it like a flare of sunshine.

They began to walk home. There below them were the mill chimneys of industrial Milton with black stormclouds of the future gathering about, but they knew nothing of that yet, and here, above it where they were, the sky was dazzling blue. Of course he held her hand all the way down and back to the mill yard. She wore gloves, but he felt her fingers press against his steadfastly the whole while. He had waited so long for her, and somehow, by some miracle, here she was, come home to him at last. She loved him. How had that happened? How could they ever let go of one another ever again? At the window above, a mother waited for her son to come home, and saw, and knew.

She needed all the time it took them to cross the yard, mount the stairs and enter the room to prepare a tolerable appearance at the news they broke, hiding the bitterness in her heart and guarding it.

If only you had never looked back, Miss Hale .

END

Author's notes:

Apart from one or two kind reviewers,to whom I am very grateful, I might as well be posting into a void! but anyway I guess I shall carry on bringing over my stories from AO3, and the next will be a long one with an M rating, so if you are interested, subscribe.