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“Is it Sarah?”

“It is not Sarah, either, my dear,” said Marianne. She sat down beside him upon the window seat, and took his hand, and it seemed to her that in her whole life she had never had so much difficulty in getting out a sentence. “Henry. It is about your father.”

Something changed in his face. It did not go blank. It became, if anything, more intent, as though he had heard a piece of music he knew begin in another room; and he said, after a pause, quite composedly, “Is he dead?”

“No. He is alive, and quite well. He is in London.”

“In London?”

“He has been in London for some time. He lives in Upper Grosvenor Street, which is about two hundred yards from here. He is married. He has a wife, and two children.” She stopped and steadied her voice. “He heard, a few weeks ago, that you were with us. And he came to the Gardens one morning, to look at you. He did not speak. He had no right to speak, and he knew it; he only stood a long way off. We did not tell you, because we did not know what to do.”

There was silence.

“There was a man,” said Henry slowly, “behind a bush.”

“Yes.”

“I did not see him. But Ned said — Ned said that there was a gentleman who was looking, and I said it was only a person with a telescope.” He was staring at her with an odd, wide, absorbed expression. “And I did see a boy. He was on the far side with a green kite that got into a tangle. He looked like me. I thought it was funny. I thought — I thought he had the same hair.”

“That was his son,” said Marianne gently. “He is seven. He has a little sister of five.”

“That was my brother?” said Henry.

He said it in a voice she had not heard before, very low and even, with something behind it like a person feeling in the dark for a step. He looked at the Colonel. The Colonel, who had been standing very still by the desk, with his hands clasped behind him, came across the room, and sat down on the other side of the boy, and put an arm about his shoulders.

“Yes,” said the Colonel. “Half-brother. I am very sorry, Henry, that you had to find it so.”

“Do they know?”

“The boy does not, I think. His mother — the lady — knows. She was very kind to us, last night.” He hesitated. “She said that you were much thought of.”

Henry took a long time to answer this. He looked at his boots. He turned a button on his coat around between his finger and thumb and pulled a bit of loose thread out of the seam and looked at that. He was a clever boy, and he was not a foolish one, and he had, in the course of ten years, been given a great deal of truth, in careful pieces, by people who had never lied to him; and he had, therefore, the extremely rare habit of listening to what was said to him and putting it beside what he knew.

“I have wondered what he is like. I do not mean that I want to like him. I do not know if I ought. I heard Mrs. Jennings tell Lady Middleton that he was a scoundrel; and when I told Uncle Edward what they said, he said that he was sorry I had overheard it.” He looked up. “Mamma. Did he love my mother?”

It was the question that she had known might come and had dreaded for years; and she found, when it arrived, that she had, in fact, been given an answer. She said it quite steadily.

“I do not think he knew how, my darling. I think he thought that he did. I think that he was very young, and very pleased with himself, and had never been asked to be anything else; and that when the time came, he was not able to.”

“That is sad,” said Henry. He said it quite simply, without the smallest air of judgement, in the tone in which he might have remarked upon a bird with a broken wing; and Marianne, who had been braced for tears, or anger, or a fit of temper, was stopped, all at once, in her breath, by the pure unexpected mercy of it. “I think that is very sad. I should not like to be a person who did not know how.”

“You will not be,” said the Colonel, and his voice was not entirely steady.

“I would not like to be. I hope it is not in the family.” He said it with a small, crooked smile that was, all at once, the very ghost of the man in the ballroom; and then it went out, and his face crumpled, and he put both arms round his mother’s waist and hid his head against her, and stayed so, quite silent, for a long time, while she held him and looked over his head at her husband, and did not trust herself to speak.

“And I should like to be by myself and think things over, for a bit.”

“Of course,” said the Colonel.

He slid off the window seat. He stood for a moment, straight and thin and small, in the middle of the Turkey carpet, with the dust of the room dancing round him in a bar of light; and then he walked to the door, and opened it, and went out, and shut it behind him with perfect quietness, in the manner of a person who has been taught that there are times when it is unkind to bang.

He did not go to the nursery. He went out by the back stairs, and through the scullery, and down into the mews, where the grooms were washing a carriage and nobody paid him any attention; and he sat down upon the mounting-block at the end of the row, in the thin May sunshine, with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands and looked at a cobblestone.

He had been there for perhaps ten minutes when a small brown person in a pinafore, with a smear of jam on her chin and a very large hair-ribbon coming undone, came down the steps of the back door, and looked about her, and walked, with the concentrated unhurried gait of a sailor on the deck of a ship, across the wet cobbles, and sat down upon the mounting-block beside him.

She did not say anything. She was by nature a person of great talkativeness; but she had a sense, which her mother had been at some pains to develop in her, that there were times when the kind thing was to sit next to somebody and say nothing at all. She sat and swung her feet. She watched the groom. After a while, she took a small, rather damp, and considerably crumpled piece of bread and butter out of her pinafore pocket, and broke it in half, and handed him the larger piece.

“Thank you,” said Henry, without looking up.