Her smile is a gentle one, he thinks: warm and inviting, and with an intensity in her eyes that is at once appealing and a little startling. He smiles in answer, shaking his head. It is a strange thought, that she would have been worried in the slightest about missing her chance - a strange thought that anyone could think that of him. And yet, why would it be strange for her to think it? She knows little enough about him, sees him rarely enough, that there is no reason she would know the kind of man he is; nor to know the kind of man that, despite his father's aspirations, he is not.

"You have missed nothing," he reassures her, in lieu of anything better to say. "Though I am glad that the chance was taken. I would not have dared ask." Not when she is so much younger than he is, and so much untouched by the things that haunt him; not when she is so casual an acquaintance, and one he knows so little about.