Alfred raised an eyebrow when she said she'd been kicked out — but the fact that it was only for the afternoon ruled out any serious misbehavior on her part. It was more likely that they'd sent her off for her own well being, or that she was too dead-on-her-feet tired to be doing anything useful and had started just getting in the way, one or the other. Either way, the logical place to go following such a dismissal would have been home, not to the Museum. Had she just decided to come here on a whim? Technically, they'd talked about it before, in their letters, but he hadn't been expecting her, by any means. Maybe this was the first time she'd had any free time at all to do as she pleased, and she'd come here because she'd been trying to find the time since she'd first written to him — which seemed slightly ominous.

Maybe it only seemed ominous because he kept expecting her to be angry at him. Maybe the fact that she'd come here instead of going literally anywhere else only struck him as odd because in her shoes, he was sure he would have been avoiding anything like confrontation after their last encounter. Still. Alfred shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other and tucked his hands into his jacket pockets. "So," he began, halting almost immediately to try and get a grasp of what he was actually trying to say. "Did you — uhm — want to talk — about something?"

Hopefully that was clear enough that she would know what he meant, because he didn't even know what he meant. It wasn't as though he wanted to talk about what had happened before he'd gone underway, particularly, and if anything had happened since then that was work talking about he certainly wasn't going to be the one to bring it up. He just had a feeling that there was something, whether he could articulate it or not.