Only to find, on a chair at the woman's side, feet dangling and a book in her lap, his wife as a small child. Her blonde hair was a bird's-nest of curls, and she was as utterly oblivious to her surroundings as ever she was when similarly bent over one of her Hebrew texts. His glass lingered here even longer before he tore it away and moved on.

The only indications of a younger sibling were the small tin cup and spoon piled with the other plates and a silver rattle discarded atop a sack of flour, although the closed tent door suggested a sleeping child within. Some days had clearly passed since the first photograph of the tent city—the wear on the grass alone told him that—and in that time, standards had relaxed somewhat, yet paradoxically others had asserted themselves. Thus, hats and even skirts had given way to head-ties and the occasional trousers, and drying laundry peeped from the tie-ropes as the distance between park (with its water supply and living quarters) and home (where laundry might be decently hung to dry) grew ever more onerous; however, at the same time the demarcations between one family's quarters and the next had become more formalised: chairs lined up along the agreed-to boundaries, facing inward to the informal court-yard before each tent; one such division had even been neatly drawn with a line of white pebbles. “Streets” had formed themselves between the ranks of outdoor “drawing rooms”; children played there, a woman with a bucket of water walked away from the camera, and a man approached.

Holmes' interest quickened again, and he moved the glass over the distant figure. What came into focus was a tall, light-haired man with a moustache, eerily familiar despite his gender. His spectacles caught the light, his bowler hat blurred slightly as he returned it to his head, having raised it to the woman with the bucket. The photographer must have called his subjects to attention in some manner because several faces were raised towards the lens, including that of the man trudging up the hill.

The blond man's twill trousers were spattered with dark stains and one knee looked in need of mending. On his upper body he wore only a shirt, the collar missing, sleeves rolled up his forearms to reveal a clean bandage on one wrist. He appeared to hold himself erect by will alone, and Holmes did not need to see his face to know that it wore the look of a soldier in the trenches, the gaze both interior and far away. This man ached with fatigue and with the things he had witnessed, longed to collapse into sleep for a day and a night, yet equally clearly he was only here temporarily, for his shoulders were braced against the labours to come.