We're back in Toronto for a chapter, so I hope the shift isn't too much of a jar. As ever, thanks in spades for reading and/or reviewing.

We have finally got our curate, writes Persis to Nina, early in 1926. Like every curate we've encountered while travelling, he makes little to no conscious impression on his audience once they've left him. Partly that comes from Glover house; the furniture would stifle even the most animated person, and he is hardly that. The first time I met him he was sitting with great precision on the edge of one of those overwrought and high-backed lion's head chairs that crowd that parlour, trying to look at ease and positively competing with Mia for nerves. She, as it happens, had retreated behind the security of the Royal Albert, which hardly made for a smooth beginning. Mia does a very credible imitation of a college Dean when called upon. I don't think she would have done in this instance except that Mrs. Glover had deigned to join us and was reclining in state on a chaise-lounge, watching her like a hawk. And the more Mrs. Glover watches, I have learned, the more precise and clipped Mia becomes –not for nothing, it turns out was she sent away to some English girls' school in the country for years. She can be brutal in her polish and efficiency. Carl said afterwards that had we not been there, and Father Cameron too, he supposed they would have sat in stilted silence punctuated by the noise of the china and Mrs. Glover putting the fear of God into the pair of them, and I'm not convinced he's wrong.

Anyway, he is called Victor Cross, has a voice that reads well, though with flat vowels when nerves triumph over Received Pronunciation, and he has been favoured with eyes the colour of green olives and brown hair more unruly even than Stuart's.

'My hair isn't unruly!' says Stuart indignantly.

'Only a little,' Nina mildly answers, reaching across the low coffee table and brushing a sandy curl behind Stuart's ear before he can duck out of her way in time.

'Anyway,' says Nina, 'it doesn't matter; no one on earth can hold a candle to you for sheer cheek.'

Stuart opens his mouth to reply, but before he can summon clever enough words, Nina has resumed reading aloud …All this dates to mid-December, of course, but we were so at sea, what with reordering what was to be his room, and introducing him to Oxford, that there hasn't been a moment to write and tell you about him before now.

'Introduce him to Oxford!' says Nina half-despairing, half-amused, 'didn't I tell you we'd never get them back? They were new themselves less than a year ago –and Persis was still discernibly Presbyterian then.' She shakes her head and resumes the letter. By some piece of luck Carl and Father Cameron had just put the finishing touches on that upstairs bedsit when I told them that tea was ready and the new curate had arrived. None of them –least of all Mrs. Glover –quite believed me at first, but they were willing enough to go down to tea and meet him. It was a relief though when finally Mrs. Glover rose up out of that chaise-lounge with much pomp and circumstance, made apologies and said the morning had quite worn her out. I didn't see how –she hadn't done a thing but boss us –but we were all too relieved to contradict her.

Everyone softened a bit after that, the curate going so far as to actually lean back into the uncomfortable lion head chair and insist we begin on first-name terms at once. 'Anything else doesn't sound like me,' he said.

It wasn't miles away from what Mia had once said to us, and we were ready enough to go along with it. Mia though got that look in her eye that betrays that it wasn't sheer luck that got her through three years at an Oxford college and also that she can in fact be something more than Mrs. Glover's housekeeper when she wants to be and said, 'not until you drop 'Miss Glover.' I was only ever that to the dons at St. Hilda's. It doesn't sound like me either.'

It was a valiant effort but it didn't take, and anyway, given her earlier reserve I have difficulty believing she couldn't hold her own against the Dean of St Hilda's. But as I write this, weeks after the fact, she is still 'Miss Glover' to Victor Cross, and I don't know who is more perplexed by it, Mia, or Carl and I.

Since then, away from Mrs. Glover and her absurdity, he has emerged a quiet, reliable and kind person. This last based purely on his treatment of a pigeon that stunned itself flying into his bedroom window. He turned up on our doorstep with it some days after arriving and said meek as ever, would Carl and I mind his hospitalising it at Silver Moon as he didn't imagine Mrs. Glover or her daughter would be in favour of healing ministry for avians. I have an everlasting grudge against the pigeons of Oxford, as they are bold as anything and glory in taunting Symp, but of course I said we'd let him nurse this one back to health at ours if he could do it without providing Symp with lunch. Carl liked him at once for it.

'You can take the measure of a fellow's kindness,' he said when Victor –I cannot think of him as Rev. Cross, though Mia seems to manage it –had gone, 'by the way he treats an animal.'

Needless to say, they are now thick as two thieves, debating theology and eking out what insects there are to be had in January. What Boxelder bugs and the doctrine of transubstantiation have in common I leave for you to tell me; Mia and I have tried and still can't find the connection.

'I don't suppose you understand how those two relate?' asks Nina of Stuart Ross. The New Year has brought her back to Toronto, and they sit now in the little parlour off of the kitchen of the house on the corner of Sussex and Huron that once belonged to Nina's aunt.

'Let me look.' Stuart takes the letter, squints at it – asks 'why do women have such impossible handwriting' –and then shrugs elegantly, a fluid gesture he has learned from Nina.

'Dunno,' he says at last, handing the letter back and dodging with an artist's skill the gentle cuff aimed his way for his commentary on Persis's copperplate. He clutches theatrically at his unscathed elbow, provoking Nina to raising her eyebrows.

'Just because they can't fault your singing,' she tells him as she pours out the tea that has been steeping while they processed the news from Oxford, 'does not mean you will never be accused of overacting.'

'I'm only doing what I've been taught,' says Stuart devilishly.

'Not by me you weren't,' says Nina, daring to entrust one of her aunt's glass enamel teacups to Stuart's outsized hands.

'Not on purpose,' concedes Stuart, 'but they do say, don't they, that all sopranos –'

'Have I ever,' says Nina at once lofty, arch and playful, 'been lumped with 'all sopranos'?'

'Never,' says Stuart solemnly, and for a wonder he is sincere. He bends precariously forward for the milk jug and adds a haphazard measure of milk to his tea.

'That's settled that then. Now tell me; how long do you think it would take to do up a christening shawl?'

'Dunno,' says Stuart again. Then curious, 'anyway, I thought you hated sewing?'

'Dear boy, how curious your remembering that. As it happens I do, very much. Lace knitting though I can bear because it does up quickly, and because it remains one of the few things Auntie did succeed at teaching me that involves a needle, but only just.' She smiles.

Stuart shakes his head; the nuances of sewing and knitting are lost on him.

'Why d'you want to anyway?'

'Shall I read you the rest of this letter and tell you?'

'I thought I was finding the connection between Box-something-or-others and –what was the other thing?'

"Transubstantiation,' says Nina. 'Sometimes Stuart, you would try a saint, and I'm hardly that.'

'I don't see why,' says Stuart, 'I'm only –yes, all right, go on, of course I want to hear the rest of it. Really. Though for what it's worth, I swear you've been known for saintliness and long-suffering.'

'Only when I sing,' says Nina regally before returning her attention to the letter.

You expressed at the close of your last letter a hope that all our wishes would be gratified this year, and it's certainly the season for it. I won't vouch for all of them –I don't think anyone has that sort of luck anymore –but certainly the chief wish has met with resolution. You might write and let me know what Carl and I would have to do to talk you into being godmother to a baby due about Easter. We'd have asked before –at Christmas after the opera –but experience suggested there might be sense in waiting to tell you.

I gather from a certain retired priest that the proper thing to wish you in the run-up to Salome is into the mouth of the wolf. That sounds like madness, so know that we have tremendous faith in the production and are sorry to be missing it; we expect a full report well before you're back our side of the water.

'Does that explain at all about the christening shawl?' asks Nina, refolding the letter.

'No,' says Stuart. 'Well, I mean, it does, but I still don't see why you'd do it if you don't really enjoy sewing.'

'Knitting,' says Nina, 'I've told you.' She makes an effort not to laugh and succeeds by taking Stuart's teacup from him and giving her attention over to replenishing it.

'There are many things I'd do for Persis, christening shawls for her children are really the least of them. Liking doesn't come into it.' She returns the teacup to Stuart and attends to her own.

'I always supposed,' says Stuart, considering his tea, 'that after the war we'd go back to doing just as we liked. It hasn't happened at all like that and I have the strangest feeling that most of the time you don't mind.'

As before he adds a generous dollop of milk to his tea. Nina watches him and tries to find the words to explain that what he is describing has nothing to do with the war and everything to do with growing up. When she cannot she says instead, speaking of the milk, 'that will stick in your throat.'

Stuart beams at her. 'It hasn't stopped you,' he says as she mixes a little of the milk into her tea.

'I'm not the one with a voice lesson coming due,' Nina tells him, and now Stuart is laughing. He has never been overmuch concerned about which foods do what to his voice, and he is not about to start, not even in the uncertain January sunlight sitting in the parlour of what is now Nina's Toronto home. She shakes her head, acknowledges the truth of this and concedes that there is perhaps no circumstance under which one can reasonably expect a growing boy to fast.

'You know,' says Nina as an afterthought, 'you needn't take all your cues from me.'

'Oh I don't know,' Stuart says, helping himself to a sweet like fudge –'red cow sweets' he used to call them as a little boy because of their wrappers – 'I can't think of anyone better to parrot.'

'You needn't parrot anyone,' says Nina, succeeding this time at rapping his knee sharply with the corner of the letter from Oxford, 'and you needn't talk to me the way you do to the young conservatory sopranos whose hearts you mangle.'

'Who says I mangle them?' asks Stuart glibly. Getting no answer he helps himself to another of the red cow sweets and he invokes not the ghost of his former teacher, but Persis's brother.

'It's only what Ken used to do,' he says.

'No,' says Nina, 'not to me. That's one thing Ken never dared try, and why we got on so well; he had the good manners to know when he oughtn't risk breaking anyone's heart.'

'Who says that's what I was angling for?' Stuart wants to know.

'Dear boy,' murmurs Nina, sounding at once affectionate and absent, 'this won't do, you know it won't.'

'You still think I'll wake up some morning and change my mind,' says Stuart as he folds the candy wrapper into a neat square, and the words betray the accusation he has been trying not to make of her as he rests his elbows on his knees, his chin on his cupped hands and looks at her fixedly. Somewhere on the table the folds of the wrapper unravel and it springs up like a paper jack-in-the-box.

'I know you will,' says Nina patiently, and she begins gently, easily, serenely, to hum the Marschallin's line in that most celebrated of trios.

'How can you know?' asks Stuart, and now he is not accusing, only playful, bright-eyed as ever and perhaps a little curious. He considers, then plucks and begins to unwrap another sweet.

It might be early January and the time-honoured calendrical marker for new beginnings, but at eleven in the morning, with the sunlight playing on the snowdrifts, it is still too early to talk of anything so complicated as feelings. Nina spares a thought for the retired Father Cameron and Mia Glover, both of Oxford, and smiles as she fails to answer this question; the habits of England are indeed catching.

She says instead, 'dear boy,' ever gentle and soft, and then as she turns the conversation, 'tell me about the music they're making you learn.'

In the house at the corner of Sussex and Huron, Stuart unbends and relents with a good grace. That he remains unconvinced Nina sees in the sparkle of his eyes; she has done no more than temporarily divert him, and after all, she has known she could never manage more than that. Stuart chatters on about his music, what he is learning, what he wishes to learn, becomes her pupil again long enough to ask her opinion. Nina gives it, and as she does so stops once and for all trying to talk him out of fascination and into sense, consciously now leaving the victory to time.