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She put it on. It fit her smallest finger as though it had been waiting there, and Henry thought that was perhaps the best discovery of the day, though he did not say so.

“Thank you,” said Elinor. She looked at the four of them, one after another. “All of you.”

“Now you and Aunt Marianne both have one!” Ned said proudly.

She smiled brightly. Sarah came and slipped her arm through her mother’s, and Anne leaned into Wycliffe’s shoulder, and for a moment nobody in the study at Berkeley Square said a word.

“I want it noted,” Ned said with a wide grin, “that I found them.”

Mary Marsh and her family arrived that evening, travel-worn and a little dazed, Mary with her bonnet gone quite flat on one side and Mr. Marsh carrying, against all the protests of the nursery-maid, his own sleeping son up the front steps rather than hand him over to be carried by anyone else; and it was not until the next afternoon, when the trunks had been unpacked and the different rooms had begun, by slow degrees, to feel a little less strange, that the first callers were let in.

The next day they came as a party, and announced themselves, through the open drawing-room door, well before they could be seen: Margaret’s voice first, pitched for distance, declaring that she did not care in the least whether it was the fashionable hour to call, she had not travelled from Portman Square to stand on ceremony with her own niece; and behind her, Cecilia, laughing, and begging Mary’s pardon for the whole of the invasion; and between the two of them, moving with the particular dignified reluctance of a girl of twelve who considers herself above being hurried, Meg, in a straw bonnet a size too grown-up for her, with a small wrapped parcel held very carefully in both hands.

“There you are,” said Margaret, sweeping in and embracing her niece with the thoroughness of a woman who had crossed considerably rougher country than London in her time. “And there is the boy. Oh, Mary, he is a beautiful thing. Come here, sir, and let your great-aunt look at you properly.”

Georgie, who was four, and had been regarding the sudden crowded drawing-room from the safety of his father’s knee with the solemn wariness of a general surveying unfamiliar terrain, allowed himself, after a moment’s consideration, to be drawn forward; and it was Meg who won him first, crouching down to his own height without the least self-consciousness and presenting her parcel with the gravity of an ambassador delivering a treaty.

“It is a wooden horse,” said Meg. “I chose him myself. He is called Caesar, because Mamma says all the best horses in history were called something grand, and I thought you had better start as you mean to go on.”

Georgie accepted Caesar with both hands, and a stare of such complete and silent rapture that there was general laughter round the room; and it was in the middle of this, with tea being poured and chairs drawn up and everybody talking at once, that Ned came wandering in from the library, where he had ostensibly been reading, and had in fact been listening to the whole arrival through the wall.

He was fifteen now, having just lately grown two inches in as many months and acquired a voice that had not yet settled on a register it meant to keep, and bore a decided resemblance to nobody in the family so much as to a description Marianne once gave of Edward at first meeting him, minus the shyness; and he came to a halt in the doorway, surveyed the room, and said, with the particular gravity he reserved for his very worst jokes:

“I see we are to be a cavalry regiment. I had better warn you all now, Caesar there has a weak hind leg, and will very likely desert to the enemy the first time Georgie takes him into the nursery under heavy fire from the cat.”

Meg, who had not expected to be addressed at all, looked up in surprise, and then burst into a startled, delighted peal of laughter that she tried, a little too late, to smother behind her hand.

“There is no cat.”

“There is always a cat,” said Ned darkly. “It is a law of nurseries. You will not see it for a week, and then it will walk across the middle of a battle as though it owned the house, which it generally does within the month. I speak from long and bitter experience. I was once obliged to surrender an entire fleet of toy soldiers to a cat named Horatio, on the grounds that he had sat down in the middle of them and would not be reasoned with.”

“What happened to them?”

“Nothing happened to them. That was the whole tragedy of it. Horatio simply sat, for the better part of an afternoon, directly upon the Prussian infantry, and no power on earth could persuade him to move, and my sister Sarah declared that the Prussians had surrendered honourably and ought to be allowed to keep their dignity, and that was the end of the campaign.” Ned shook his head, with the air of a man recalling an old defeat. “I have never fully recovered my confidence in the Prussian infantry.”

Meg had abandoned any pretence of composure, and was laughing properly now, both hands pressed to her face. Ned, well satisfied with his audience, helped himself to a slice of seed-cake from the tray, and settled against the back of a chair as though he meant to stay a while after all.

“You are the famous Meg, then, who has been everywhere.” He said it carelessly, through a mouthful of cake. “I have heard a great deal about your grandmother and your grandfather and the whole business of Peru. I suppose you have been dragged along on a dozen of these expeditions yourself. Volcanoes, and ruins, and camels, and that sort of thing.”

Meg’s face underwent a sudden and complete change, the laughter going out of it all at once, and something a good deal more like exasperation taking its place. “I have never been anywhere in my life.”

“Never?”

“Not once. Not to Paris, not to Rome, not even to the Lakes, though I have asked for the Lakes every single summer since I was eight and have been told every single summer that I am not yet old enough.” She said it with great bitterness, counting the grievance off almost by rote, as one does an injury turned over so many times it has worn perfectly smooth. “Mamma went up a pyramid before she was my age. Grandmother was digging up a Roman floor in a field in Dorset when she was younger than I am now. And I am not permitted so much as a week at Brighton, because Papa says a young lady ought to have her lessons first and her adventures after, which I think is a very convenient thing for a person to say who has already had the whole of his adventures and is only keeping me from mine out of habit.”

Ned considered this with every appearance of grave sympathy. “It is a hard case.”

“It is a monstrous case.”

“You might run away to sea.”

“I have thought of it,” said Meg, with perfect seriousness, “but I am told I should be sick, and there is nothing adventurous about being sick over the side of a ship for a fortnight, however far it carries you.”

“No,” Ned agreed. “I believe that is generally considered to spoil the romance of the thing.” He bowed to her with great ceremony, and remarked, as he made for the door again, that he left the regiment in her capable hands, as he had urgent business with a Latin exercise that had been putting off its own defeat for a week and could not be allowed to hold out any longer.

“He is always like that,” said Mary, fondly, into the laughter that followed him out. “He comes in, says three things that make no sense and are somehow extremely funny, and goes again before anybody can ask him to explain himself. Papa says he gets it from nobody in particular, and that this is itself rather alarming.”

“I like him,” said Meg, with the simple finality of twelve years old, still smiling at the door he had gone out by; and then, recollecting her ambassadorial duties, turned back at once to Georgie and his horse, and the small grave business of deciding, between them, exactly how many Prussians Caesar could be trusted to carry into battle.