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“It is not the swag.” Phoebe looked down at the glove. “It is that you are kind to me, and I have not earned it. I stood by in that house for two years and watched things done to you that I knew were wrong, and I never once said so where it would have cost me anything. I said it in passages, where Mama could not hear.” Her fingers whitened on the glove. “That is not the same as saying it, and I am ashamed of it.”

Rosalind sat very still, her heart turning over. To have a Faulkner call the thing by its true name was more than she had ever looked for.

“You were a girl,” she said at last. “You were seventeen, and it was your mother’s house. There was nothing you could have said that would not have cost you everything and mended nothing.”

“That is what I told myself, and it is even true. But it excused me, and I took it.” Phoebe steadied herself. “I do not say it to be forgiven. I say it because I have decided that I shall stop glancing at the door before I am kind.”

“What decided you?”

The question was out before Rosalind had weighed it. She saw the color come up in Phoebe’s face, and the glance start toward the door from habit and then, this once, not finish.

“A great many things,” Phoebe said, and she did not say Mr. Danforth, and she did not need to. “Watching you, mostly. You came to London a fortnight ago, and now you laugh sometimes. You say what you think. You let people be kind to you.”

“Phoebe.”

“You were always like this. Nobody at home made room for it, and I helped them by keeping quiet. I cannot watch that and stay quiet any longer. And there is the thing I came mostly to tell you, which is about Mama.” Her fingers tightened on the glove. “I do not think anyone else can tell you it, for nobody else has lived inside it.”

“You need not tell me anything,” Rosalind began.

“I want to. May I say it all, and badly, and you will sort it after? It is what you are good at.”

“Go on, then.”

Phoebe leaned in, her voice low. “She is not what you think she is. The cold of her is real, and I do not excuse it. But under it she is afraid, Rosalind.”

“Afraid? Of what? She has the title, the house, my father’s name.”

“Losing it all. Mama married Marbury to be safe, and she has never felt safe a day since. She looks at you and does not see a stepdaughter. She sees a portion that might have been her girls’.” She stopped, as though she had come to the edge of something she had not meant to come near. “And a face she does not like to look at. There is something in your face that frightens her, and I have learned not to ask.”

“My face?” Rosalind’s hand went still. “What can there be in my face to frighten anybody?”

“I do not know. I only know that I stopped asking.”

The words caught at something as they went past, though Rosalind could not have said what. She had never favored the Hartleys — the long jaw, the heavy-lidded calm, stamped upon every cousin she had ever met and somehow not upon her. The plain one, the odd one out, the daughter who favored nobody. It was an old settled verdict, and she let it lie.

“You are telling me she is frightened,” she said slowly, “as though that should make it easier to bear.”

“No,” Phoebe said. “I did not think it would be easier. I only thought you ought to know it.”

The fire settled in the grate, and somewhere in the next room a page turned.

“That is a great deal to give a person,” Rosalind said, “when you have only just decided to stop glancing at the door for her.”

“I know, and I have rather thrown myself at it.” Phoebe gave a small unsteady laugh, the glove forgotten in her lap. “Charlotte would have done it more gracefully, but I have not Charlotte’s way. I have only the one way, which is to say the thing plainly and hope that it serves.”

“It has served.”

“Mr. Danforth says a true thing ought not to be made smaller than it is, and I have decided that I believe him.” Her chin came up a little. “So I shall not take any of it back, however badly I have said it.”

She had said his name without the smallest falter, and Rosalind marked it and said nothing of it, but put it away with the swag, and the half-moment at the table, and the look of a girl who had, just for an instant, let her warmth show.

“You have not said it badly,” Rosalind said. “And Cassandra? Does she know you have come here tonight?”

“No.” Phoebe folded the glove once more, quite calmly. “And I do not care. That is new as well.”

“Then a great deal is new,” Rosalind said, and held out her hand. “Thank you, Phoebe. For telling me.”

Phoebe took it.