She wanted Charles to kiss her, the Charles who had been a scrubby schoolboy when she had been a baby, an adolescent when she was a little girl, always there, often complaining at her being in his way, yet also somehow always prepared to give up his time. The incident with the kite, when he had cut his chin, had been one such. Looking at it from his perspective she could only wonder at his patience. What youth of fifteen would want to help a six-year-old fly a kite? He had not, but she had pestered him and he had given in, and stood behind her and helped her. Then there had been a wasp flying about her face, and she had panicked, and it had stung her nose and she had pulled so hard upon the kite strings that it had crashed into a tree. She had been screaming, and while her nursemaid fussed over her, Charles had climbed the tree to rescue her blue kite to cheer her up, and had slipped on his way down and tumbled the last few feet. A branch had caught the side of his chin and gashed it, and so the nursemaid had ended up screaming too, at the sight of the blood. Henrietta vaguely recalled there being quite a lot of it for what ended up a small white scar. It felt odd, wrong, to be wanting that same ‘brotherly Charles’ to kiss her.

Admittedly, in the last few years he had not seemed much older than herself, but … to want his kisses? She sighed. What if she let herself think of a future with him? There would be leaving home, but only just, and the same neighbours and Papa able to see them every day if he wished and … No. That would make her think she wanted to marry Charles as a means of solving her marriage problem and yet not leave her own familiar surroundings, and that must not influence her. But what was she thinking? To consider him as a husband at all was … the unthinkable being thought. She had plenty of men who liked her, perfectly nice men.

A small but insistent voice in her head said ‘yes, but you love none of them’.

She hid under the bedclothes, but the thought did not go away, and when she slept, she was aware of a loneliness, because Charles Henfield was not anywhere in the world of the dream.