Harold's collapse of faith at Wooler is the nadir of his pilgrimage, the point at which the quiet conviction that had carried him from Kingsbridge to the edge of the Cheviot Hills finally gives way. For weeks he had walked with the certainty that Queenie Hennessy would live as long as he kept moving, that his journey was a kind of bargain with fate. Now, late one night, standing in a phone box with the world rushing past outside, he reverses the charges as he always does, and when he hears Maureen's voice he says the words he has been holding back: 'I can't do it. I can't finish.' It is a confession that undoes everything he has believed, and it comes not from a moment of dramatic crisis but from a slow, grinding exhaustion that has stripped him of the ability to remember which muscles serve which limbs, or how it would help to blow on his knuckles in the cold.