Winter starts to soften into spring and every day Katherine expects Guy to announce that he is leaving, and yet every day he is still there at Supper.
Guy himself knows that he has to go, that staying close to Katherine is torture for him and that for his own safety he should not remain in one place for long. So every day he rises in the morning thinking that this will be the day on which he will leave, but he simply cannot tear himself away.
They exchange only the occasional word and Katherine has stopped trying to reach out and comfort him; she senses that it angers him and makes him feel belittled.
She is at a loss as to how she can reach him. She begins each morning determined to try to talk to him and to tell him how much she desires him. She needs to let him know how he now seems to be a more complete man to her than he had ever been. However, after several hours of his scowling black looks and seeming indifference, she finds her courage fails her.
The day ends yet again with her sitting in her bedchamber thinking of how sweet it would be to be able to take Guy into her arms.
If Katherine but knew it he is sitting on the edge of his bed thinking exactly the same thoughts of her.
But if relations between Katherine and Guy are withering, other friendships within the household are starting to blossom.
Martha, since learning of Guy’s history, has begun to treat him with a little more respect. And now that Guy does not appear like such a towering, brooding presence, Martha and Robert’s children have quite taken to him. He provides some much needed variety in their lives, and a completely new view of the world.
Stephen has recently discovered the delights of the opposite sex and he finds Guy a patient listener. He can ask Guy questions he would never dare to ask his parents.
But it is Alice who manages to break down some of the barriers that Guy had built around himself.
She has a child’s callous way of asking questions and pays no heed to his black scowling. One evening when Katherine is passing through the kitchen she hears Alice ask Guy whether it had hurt when they had taken off his hand. Katherine waits for the inevitable snarl from him and sees Robert and Martha looking at Alice with wide-eyed horror.
Guy surveys Alice for a moment and then calmly tells her that it had hurt greatly, but then he had lost consciousness and could remember nothing more. Emboldened by this answer, Alice goes on to ask him all kinds of other personal questions, such as how does he dress himself and why doesn't he wear a stuffed glove tied on to the end of his stump?
Whilst the adults in the room are mortified, Alice just sits there smiling and so Guy answers all of her questions without rancour.
It does not take Katherine long therefore to work out that if she wants to know something about Guy, she can use Alice to find the answer. Conversely, it does not take Guy long to realise that some of the questions Alice is asking seem too complex to be coming directly from a child’s brain.
It is by this means that Katherine and Guy slowly begin to communicate.
Katherine finds out that after being rescued, Guy had been taken to a monastery where he had stayed for almost six months. For a large part of that time he was insensible to what was going on around him. Then one day he had simply got up and walked away. Since then he had travelled widely, avoiding the big towns and picking up small jobs of work wherever he could. Or stealing things, in order to have sufficient money to keep himself constantly drunk.
In the summer he slept outside, anywhere he could; in the winter he was sometimes lucky and found a bed for the night. Katherine wanted desperately to find out to whom those beds belonged but was afraid that the answer would be unsuitable for Alice’s tender ears.
