Miss Whitby! The wrong one, of course, but still Calvin perked up slightly at the name. There were five of them. He'd been in school with Sage Whitby, who was a mediwitch, and Tess Whitby, who worked at her father's print shop. Neither were in his year, but close enough to remember them. Then there was his Miss Whitby, then two younger sisters he hadn't met yet. He wanted the whole family to like him, he had decided, though he had more tangible strategies with some of them than with others (how did one make a positive impression on a thirteen year old? he wasn't sure yet). He'd known where Tess Whitby worked, but it hadn't occurred to him yet that her work would have brought her to these sorts of things. Was she here now? It would have been conspicuous to look around and see. The man was still looking at him, with red in his cheeks now.

"Well, thank you," he said. He felt as though he should put them away to demonstrate that he meant it and was keeping them, but he hadn't brought a bag today and he wasn't sure what else to do with them. Would it have been disrespectful to fold them so they fit in a coat pocket? "I'll read them." And he would. Hopefully the sincerity in his tone was enough to convey what he'd failed to find the appropriate action for.

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