Caroline wrote a long letter to Barbara, when he had gone back to London. "Really, darling, I think you are wrong. She does love him, just as all of us do, and he is awfully sweet to her, as he is to us. It has always been the same, and we have been glad of it. If you had not put it into my head that there might be something more, I should only have felt pleased that she had been able to console him for us all being away. Perhaps I haven't been _quite_ certain, but I do think that if it had been as you think I should have known it. For one thing I think he would have wanted to be alone with her sometimes, and perhaps she with him, if it were _she_ who wanted it, as you seemed to think. But neither of them ever showed any wish at all to be by themselves, even for a minute or two. It was all of us being happy and merry together, as it has always been. And what makes me feel more than anything that it can't be is that darling Dad seems older at the same time that he seems younger. He has been simply adorable to Maurice and me, and Maurice loves him almost as much as I do. And he is in a heaven of delight about precious B, and is going to rush off to her this afternoon the moment he can get away from the Bank. I can't help thinking that if he had it in his mind to begin all over again, for himself, with somebody so much younger, he wouldn't be _quite_ so pleased at the idea of being a grandfather. "And he was awfully sweet about you too, darling. He made me tell him _everything_ about you, and kept on asking questions about you. He does love you awfully, and it will be splendid when you come home, and can look after him, and make him happy, as B and I have tried to do." Barbara's fears were not allayed by this letter. "_He_ hasn't said he wants me home," she remarked to herself. "If he had, she'd have said so. I should only be in the way." Caroline went up to London for a day's shopping that week. She lunched with Lady Grafton, and her father came to meet her, but had to leave immediately afterwards. "The dear man!" said Lady Grafton. "I've never seen him so pleased with himself. It has given him a new lease of life. If it weren't for his hair you might take him to be about thirty." They had been talking about Beatrix, and Caroline thought she referred to that. "He'll love being a grandfather," she said. "He'll be like he was to us when we were children, with B's baby." "Let's hope he'll have babies of his own," said Lady Grafton uncompromisingly. "Most men wouldn't care about it at his age; but he will. He'll dote on them." Caroline was taken back. Those possibilities had been absent from her mind, though Ella's name had been mentioned more than once. "What _do_ you mean?" she asked. "Oh, my dear, you can't be as blind as all that. When did you ever see a man in the state he's in unless he was in love, and things were going well with him?" Caroline was silent. "_Haven't_ you seen anything?" Lady Grafton asked. "You mean with Ella?"