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There was no teasing in her voice now. The openness of it caught him unprepared.

He smiled, but his answer came more softly than he intended.

“I missed you too.”

Sarah looked ahead quickly.

Henry watched the colour rise faintly in her cheeks, then turned his attention to the gravel path. He had no idea what had changed between them, only that the girl he had left behind had become a woman he suddenly wanted very much to know.

The thought followed him all the way to the house.

And he did not understand that this homecoming had changed something nothing would be able to undo.

Chapter XXXVIII.

He came into the hall at Delaford to find the whole house in that joyful uproar that precedes a wedding and admits of no half measures.

He was embraced by everybody. He shook the Colonel’s hand and was told he had grown thinner and browner and had better eat something before he did anything else; he was seized by Marianne, who declared he was overdue and that she meant to say so at length once the wedding was safely got through and not before. He met Mr. Philip Marsh, and liked him at once, for the plain and sufficient reason that the man could speak of Mary for a quarter of an hour together without once running out of things to praise, and none of them the things a lesser man would have thought to mention.

A boy, rather a young man, walked into the room, looking as if he had run all the way from the parsonage. “Ned? Is that you?”

“The one and only,” said Ned, with his crooked smile. He had changed, of course, but Henry would have known him anywhere. For a boy of nearly sixteen he still had the chubbiness of youth and was rather short for his age.

As if reading his cousin’s mind, he added, “I know, I know. But Papa says he was just like me at this age and not to worry, I’ll grow eventually.”

Edward came up behind his son and added, “I grew three inches after my eighteenth birthday.”

“Uncle Edward!”

Then Mary, surprisingly much like he remembered, still small and composed, came into the room upon Mr. Marsh’s arm, flushed and laughing at some remark of his, with two days yet to go before her wedding and every appearance of a woman who had found, entirely by accident, over a ditch, exactly the sort of steady, particular attention she had not known until that moment she had wanted; and the whole room turned to the soon-to-be bride.

And so it went for some time; everyone was happily reunited, as they should be in the drawing-room at Delaford. But throughout the afternoon, as he spoke to everyone, he looked for Sarah again.

Currently she was standing a little apart, by the window, with Georgie Marsh — small, solemn, thumb near his mouth — installed upon her hip as though he had always lived there.

He had thought of her, in the years since he had been away, a great many times, as he had them all; only when he had pictured her, he pictured her more or less as he had left her: with mud somewhere upon her person as a permanent article of dress. He had not pictured this. He had not pictured the composure with which she was, at that moment, rescuing a small boy’s collar from a determined assault by his own fingers, nor the particular grave sweetness of her face bent over his, nor — and this struck Henry with a force quite disproportionate to the observation itself — the fact that her hair had been got, by some art he had not known existed, to stay entirely and smoothly where it had been put, drawn up into a smooth, shining, entirely unaccountable knot at the back of her head, instead of her plait coming undone.

The matter of Henry’s face, and what precisely had put that new and unaccustomed expression upon it, was allowed, for the present, to pass unremarked by everyone in the room except the two people who had noticed it most.

“You are staring, Henry,” said Marianne, at his elbow, in a voice pitched for no one but himself.

“I am not.”

“You are staring like a man who has walked into the wrong house.” His Mother’s eyes were bright with a mischief she made no effort to disguise. “She grew up. It does happen, you know, even to people one has last seen falling out of a tree.”

He could not, for the moment, produce any very creditable answer to this; and it was left to Elinor, coming up on his other side with the particular composed and knowing quiet that had watched a great many things unfold in that family without ever once being the one to say them aloud too soon, to rescue him from the necessity.

“Go and speak to her, Henry,” said Elinor. “She does not bite, whatever her aunt Marianne’s reputation might have led you to fear. And you may tell her Georgie approves of her, if you can think of nothing better to open with; it is a very safe subject and will give you both something to look at besides each other, which I think, from your present expression, might be a mercy to you.”

He went. He did not, in the event, open with Georgie; he opened, rather badly, with the weather, and was answered, with a composure that cost her — though he could not have known this, and would have been considerably more unsettled than he already was if he had — a very great deal more than it appeared to; and the two of them stood by the window for some twenty minutes, talking of nothing in particular, while the boy dozed against Sarah’s shoulder and the rest of the room went on celebrating around them, entirely unregarded by either.

Elinor watched them from across the room, over the rim of her own cup, with an expression that a stranger might have taken for simple maternal pleasure in a pretty scene, and was, in fact, a good deal more particular than that. She had known, with the quiet certainty of a woman who misses very little in her own house, since Sarah was thirteen years old and had first begun contriving reasons to be wherever Henry happened to be, exactly what the matter was; she had watched it through the treehouse years, and the Cambridge letters, and the whole of the last silent, difficult two years, and had said nothing of it to anyone, not even to Edward, on the settled principle that some things are a girl’s own property until she chooses to make them otherwise. She watched, now, the stillness that had come over her daughter’s face, and the equally and entirely unconscious difficulty that young Mr. Henry-that-was appeared to be having in looking anywhere else; and she permitted herself, behind her teacup, the smallest and most private of smiles.

Henry, for his part, understood nothing whatever of what he was looking at. He knew only that the sensible, undemanding fondness of his absence had undergone, somewhere in the space of an afternoon, a change he had no ready name for.

“She has grown up,” said he again, rather helplessly, to his aunt, some while later, when Sarah had gone to see the boy settled for his nap and the spell, such as it was, had been broken.

“So I understand you have observed,” said Elinor. “It generally does happen, Henry, given time and a fair wind.”