Going directly to collect Michel, they found him in the care of his grandfather in the sitting room. Seeing them, Pietro made a half-hearted attempt to appear dignified but couldn't disguise the love in his eyes for his grandson. 'Look at those hands and those wrists, eh? He will be a fine man some day, just like his papa.'
'Yes, and his papa's papa,' Anana said with a broad smile, giving her father-in-law a grateful kiss on the cheek for having looked after her son.
Kara found as she looked on that she felt very much left out- something she always experienced when around close-knit families. Unnoticed by the others, and feeling very much unwanted and unloved, she went outside to the back veranda to be alone. But Santiago was already there, absently smoking a pipe.
'Come, join me,' he said with an understanding smile. 'Are you feeling better now?'
Instinctively warming to him, Kara sat down. 'I'm sorry . . . I dread to wonder what you must think of me.'
'What I think,' he told her, 'is that you're unhappy, and that you need a better life than the one you've had. I think, too, that having Roman in your life will cure you of your soul-sickness.'
'Soul-sickness,' Kara muttered, surprised, considering. 'Yes, that pretty much sums up my life, in two words.'
Santiago smiled at that. 'Oh, I'm sure we could find more words to describe you.'
This drew an unwilling smile from Kara. 'All right- how about royal pain, for starters.'
Santiago laughed at this, but said soberly, 'You are very young, Kara; little more than a girl. And you have been forced to realise and understand things about people that girls . . . even most grown men . . . are normally sheltered from. That alone will make you an oddity all your life as a woman, for men in general, by nature, shelter their families. In a man's eye, there is always a bit of the child in a woman.'
He smiled, kindly. 'There is much of the child in you yet, but you are a child of war, Kara, and children of war know something that sheltered children seldom discover, and that is the frailty and uncertainty of life, and the things people are really capable of.
'You know, it is considered a truth that this amounts to a loss of innocence, and there is a tendency for people with loose tongues to gossip about the moral corruption they assume must follow. Yet no worldly man who has experienced war would question his own moral integrity, nor would a woman of substance like the Señora Castellan.