She sat, not quite frozen into position, but conscious that he required her to move slowly, and keep her head poised just so; and further conscious that she did look at her best, and that, whatever else it might be, it was art. She slowly reached down for her cup of tea.

"You know, when you are done with that, you will have to hide it, or mama will get ideas."

Tom smiled, and said: "Mothers with ideas are certainly to be avoided." And he returned to his drawing.

Tom Eaton had many squandered talents, but the one talent that he continued to keep up, as it somehow calmed him down, and made him more than usually careful, was his drawing and painting. His Colonel, on the afternoon of his disgrace, shook his head and said, "You blasted fool, you are the only decent position surveyor in this whole army, and you go and wreck it all; and now what, you'll probably end as one of these damned society portrait painters, damn you, painting old buffers who never in their lives had their false teeth rattled with enemy fire. But you are talented, you scapegrace." And he waved at the framed portrait drawing Tom had done of the Colonel's wife, which the Colonel had admired so much he had extricated his wayward subordinate from an earlier, and less total, disaster.

"What," she said, slowly bringing the cup to her lips, and exaggerating the slowness of her smile so as to make her point, and underscore her charm, "What do you want with Gerald?"

"I am inviting him on a sketching tour. We intend to join forces and tastes. He wishes to study the Palladian Jefferson, University of Virginia, Monticello, and so on, and I wish to sketch the fabled sights of the interior lands of Virginia and beyond. It is all planned."

"But the season?"

"Oh, we will be moving south, not resting there, but travelling further inland and south. We wish to take it all in. Highly romantic, you know."

She pouted, not at all slowly. "Well, I protest. I have enough trouble collecting beggars off the street to balance off my dinner table, and you are proposing to take both yourself and my brother off, well I won't stand for it."

"Too late, Effie, the train tickets are bought and paid for."

Effie looked sharply at him. "This isn't an adventure, is it? When your brother Charles was here, he fair turned Gerald's head about abolitionism. You aren't –"

Tom gently looked up at her: "What my brother Charles does with his time and money is his business. Actually, to be frank, it is my business, he keeps spending it on all these wretches, and leaves little enough for Imogen and me." Effie laughed, and then remembered, and pretended to laugh again, slowly. "Not to worry, Effie, we are artists and architects, not do-gooders. And to prove the point, here you go –" and he handed her the drawing.

She looked at it for a moment, and then said quietly: "It is very, very beautiful."

"Not as beautiful as the subject, but not bad. The nose is a bit wrong."

"I have never been quite so insulted."

"Nothing wrong with your nose, Effie, Roman emperors would have slaughtered themselves in hecatombs to possess it, and you."

She eagerly proferred her face, in hopes that he would take the opportunity to kiss her, but he had turned his attention to putting away his drawing kit. He suddenly stood up, and said, "Much to do before tomorrow."

"You mean before the party tonight, you promised to come."

"Indeed, indeed." And this time he did kiss her on her cheek. She shrugged, mildly annoyed, and saw him to the door.

He bid her farewell, and stepped down lightly into the busy street. As she closed the door, his gait altered, he shook off his nonchalant pose, and moved more slowly and seriously through the thickening traffic, as if weighing the consequences of some proposed desperate act. A trick of the light through the trees caught his attention for a few moments, and he paused by the railings of an enclosed park on the corner of the street; and if a passerby had been interested, he – or more likely she, given the elegance of his figure – would have seen a shadow of puzzled melancholy cross his brow, as if he were in search of something he had lost but had never even in fact known. Then he uttered a mild curse, struck the railings with his cane, and strode ahead into the early afternoon.