Did Daphne know what she and Sebby were doing? Roughly, at least; probably: Henrietta had sometimes sensed (almost instantly denying this to herself) an intensity to Daphne’s gaze that might have come from her sorting and weighing bits of evidence, speculating with her usual fierce intelligence as to their cause. So perhaps Daphne had known what she was doing and, since Sebby was headed soon for a studio in Rome, judged the risk acceptable—as Henrietta herself had known, without knowing the details, how intently Daphne was campaigning to win over Mrs. Thaxter’s friends. The unspoken details of their night lives were, along with the work they’d returned to sharing, part of the sturdy thread that continued to bind them. Only the lie that had started it all, and the difficult scene during which, when she finally returned home, she’d broken things off with Mason, remained her secret.

She forgot it herself, sometimes: forgot what she’d done, forgot that she and not Mason had ended their relationship. She forgot, when she saw Mason and his pleasant wife and their four boys at a holiday gathering or a fair, that she’d been the one to walk away from that life—not so she could take Daphne’s firm advice that remaining single was the better path (Daphne, across the hall, crackled the page of a book just enough to signal that she was awake if Henrietta wanted to talk, but busy if Henrietta needed her privacy)—not so that she could take Daphne’s advice, but so that, for barely more than a week, she could touch Sebby’s paint-flecked arm and feel his hair against her lips.

The Regimental History

THE REGIMENTAL HISTORY

I. HELLO TO YOU

One of her jobs at the Deverells was to gather up the letters, after they’d been read by the family and the neighbors whose sons had been mentioned, and file them in the special box. Each envelope smoothed and flattened. Each sheet unfolded, the creases pressed out under a stack of books and then gathered and tied with clean string, laid flat with the newest letter on the top.