“But who was this . . . rider?” Sidney wondered, absorbed in her account.

Irene sat for a while in deep silence. He was about to repeat his question when she replied: “We never found out. . . . Indeed now Gareth claims he does not remember any ‘race’ or any ‘rider.’ ”

Sidney looked away from her despairing and anguished face.

“There may be many trying things for you, Sidney,” she began again, “should you decide to take this responsibility upon your shoulders . . . I do not want to mitigate the fact that there may be unpleasantness, and rather a lot of it. Even when he was . . . himself, he was a difficult, headstrong, and, yes, passionate boy.”

She watched him drink the hot beverage and eat a large sweet roll heaped with strawberry glaze. He ate, she realized, in order to have something to do, not through appetite.

“You talk as if I was Vance,” he finally spoke with a full mouth, and with a trace of anger in his speech. “As I tried to tell him, prison had everything. They gave me many gifts, Mrs. Vaisey” (he fell away again from using her Christian name). “I’m broken, I guess. They broke me . . . But I can do all you expect or Gareth expects partly because I guess I am broken.”

“You are not broken, Sidney. You are perfect.”

He shook his head dubiously, but again he smiled.

“Then I can expect everything of you?” She sounded, he thought, almost like a conspirator.

“Absolutely,” he replied at once. “Where he is concerned—where you are concerned—everything.”

“As I said before,” she thanked him with her eyes, “it’s more than I could ever have hoped for.”

She picked up her own cup of the chocolate mixture for the first time, brought it to her mouth, and without having tasted it, put it down again noiselessly.

“Do you think later on, Sidney, you might even stay day and night? . . . Take up your residence here, that is . . .”

He hesitated. “I don’t know what Vance would say to that . . . Night and day . . . You see I owe him so much. It was him got me out of prison . . . He went to the Gover-­ nor . . .”

“I know,” Mrs. Vaisey said coldly. “But Vance has Dr. Ulric . . . Doesn’t he?” she added, at a look of confusion from the “caretaker.”

“But it is right,” she continued, “to begin even more slowly with you, Sidney, than we did with the others who took care of Gareth . . . They were after all not ‘called’ to be in charge of him . . . So we will expect you then only during the day for the time being . . . After that we shall see . . .”

He offered to leave then by rising, and she put her hand on his sleeve.