“Are you alright?” Roger’s father, Joseph Millbourne, asked him over breakfast the next morning. “You look a bit peaky.”
“I had an interrupted night’s sleep last night,” Roger said, cursing his face, which had always shown every minor variation in his health on his cheeks. “It will pass once I get my energy for the day.”
“Alright,” Joseph said, worried as always—Roger had been a sickly child, and even now was a touch weaker in constitution than his father, or his friends—but willing to be easily reassured. “How were the races?”
“Splendid,” Roger said, buttering a piece of toast and heaping jam upon it. “I won a few dollars.”
“Which you’ll give to the bookseller, no doubt,” Joseph said, but he was smiling, so Roger didn’t blush quite as hard as he might have otherwise.
He did pay a vis
