The Indian Gentleman

Ermengarde and Lottie can visit the attic only rarely — Miss Amelia might check, the risk is real. So Sara lives, for the most part, alone. On her errands she passes houses and watches through the lit windows at dusk: the Large Family, the doctor calling twice a day on the Indian gentleman, the ordinary life of people she has never met. She gives them names and histories and files them in her inner world alongside Becky and Melchisedec.

The Indian gentleman she particularly notices. He is English, though he has lived in India. He has been seriously ill — brain fever, the kitchen gossip says — and his fortunes have been connected with mines. Sara makes the connection to her father without saying it aloud. She watches him from her attic window with a particular tenderness. He looks unhappy in the way she recognizes: as if the material facts of life have stopped making sense.

One evening Guy Clarence, five years old and freshly moved by a story about poor children, crosses the pavement and gives Sara his sixpence. He has identified her, correctly, as someone without enough. Sara's first reaction is the heat of humiliation — she has given pennies to children like this from the steps of her carriage. Her second reaction is the decision not to let the humiliation show. She thanks him. She does not explain. She takes the sixpence home.