Springtime is here, the sun mild. He takes a long route home, through the park under an arch of greening plane trees. A line of carriages passes, a woman wiping her nose with a handkerchief, a man walking as he reads the paper, oblivious to the fact that Edwin has had to step around him. Somewhere in the city is an oak mentioned in the Domesday Book. He should find out where, go and see it. He should write to Rosalie and ask where Henry is buried. He should do a great many things. But it’s too late to love London now, he doesn’t want to. He came with an open heart and London has served him cruelly. So mostly what he should do is leave.

He and Mary will have a two-month holiday in Paris and then go home to New York.

Stepping through the door into the Fulham cottage, he has that familiar sense of shelter, for no other reason than that Mary is inside. Apparently she has a guest—he can hear the bustle in the kitchen, the murmur of voices. He hangs up his coat and hat and goes to see. There, at his kitchen table, Mary is serving tea to his brother Joe. “Hello, Ned,” Joe says. “I like your baby.”

Joe is on his way to Australia, having decided to make his fortune and buy a cattle ranch. He knows nothing about ranching, but he says he guesses he can learn it easy enough.

Edwin sends a hasty note to Mother: “Wandering boy sleeping in the guest room. Hale and hearty.”

Mother’s letter back is overjoyed. She hopes he’ll take Joe to Paris when they go. She hopes he won’t let Joe out of his sight. She tries to turn Joe’s flight into an impulsive lark. “I wish you all had money and could travel about,” she says. Yet she can’t stop herself from complaining that Joe hasn’t written himself.

She diverts briefly to the war. She thinks that Joe will want to know there is fighting near Richmond, but the city hasn’t yet fallen. Five thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine Union dead—our dead, Mother says, leaving no doubt as to her loyalties—and Philadelphia flooded with the wounded. Then this is how she closes: “Joe says I treat him as if he were still a baby. He don’t think that I love him just the same as if he were.”