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Anna watched Darcy set the basket down and held out a hand.

“The ring,” Martha explained. “She has seen where we put it.”

Darcy found the wooden ring beneath the blanket. Anna took it from him, tested it against her mouth, and appeared to approve of the new arrangements.

For half an hour there was nothing to distinguish the visit from those which had gone before. Darcy sat with Anna upon his knee. Martha put the clothes away, Ruth showed Reynolds where she wished the water jug, and the child occasionally interrupted them by dropping the ring.

Darcy picked it up once. Upon its second descent, Martha put a cloth upon the floor where it would fall.

“You need not continue bending, sir. She can amuse herself without making you do it.”

Anna stretched toward the fallen ring.

“I believe she prefers my part in the game,” he said.

“That does not make it necessary.”

He smiled and accepted the instruction.

The light faded beyond the windows. Reynolds brought in candles and showed Martha the little spare room. When they returned, Anna had begun pulling at Darcy’s sleeve with a persistence which the ring no longer satisfied.

“Are you tired?” he asked her.

She answered by turning her face against his coat, then immediately pushing away from it.

“Would you like me to take her?” Ruth asked.

Darcy looked at the child. She had been content for so long that he wished to quiet this small complaint himself. He shifted her against his shoulder and hummed the familiar air.

For a few moments she listened. Then her lower lip trembled and she began to cry.

Martha came nearer. Anna saw her and reached out both arms.

Darcy gave her over.

It ought to have been an easy thing, no more than the movement he had made a hundred times at the cottage. Here, in the rooms he had prepared and the house where he wished her to belong, it required him to put aside a foolish disappointment before it could become visible.

Martha settled Anna upon her shoulder and rubbed her back. The child’s crying diminished into small, uneven breaths.

“She is used to me at this hour,” Martha said.

“I know.”

Ruth took the blanket from the basket and laid it across Martha’s arm. Anna closed a hand upon its worn edge.

“She likes that corner,” Ruth explained. “I have tried turning it the other way. She finds it.”

“My sister was particular about a ribbon upon her cradle,” Darcy said. “I had forgotten.”

Martha looked up. “A blue one?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother would not let it be changed until the old piece was almost in two.”

He remembered Anne laughing at the state of it, then telling a nurse to put it back where Georgiana could see it. He had considered the matter beneath anyone’s serious attention at thirteen.

Anna held her blanket tightly and looked at him from Martha’s shoulder.