Alfred had watched her eyes as he spoke, and he could see the tears lurking there. This was neither the time nor the place to try and prod them out, though, when there was so much else happening and she was surrounded by strangers and trying oh so very hard to be a grown-up. She could handle them on her own time — he just wanted to let her know that there wasn't any shame in still having those feelings, whatever she said.

The little girl had moved on to what must have seemed, to her mind, a more pressing concern at the moment, which was her (very correct and astute) observation that Evander hardly seemed like the type to want a child. But it wasn't as though she was just a child; she was Evalina's child, and the idea of letting her get shipped off somewhere because she was something of an inconvenience was unconscionable. Surely, Evander couldn't have even been considering it. But if he was thinking that, Alfred wouldn't let him send her off somewhere. He didn't know what the alternative was — she certainly could not just climb aboard the Voyager and sail off into the sunset with him, cursed artifacts and all. But some sort of arrangement could be made, certainly, even if Evander wasn't able to step up to this particular challenge himself.

Luckily, none of that seemed to be necessary. At Evander's (admittedly rather bumbling) response, Alfred felt the first hint of goodwill towards his brother that he'd experienced that entire day. He grinned at the last remark (for us), and gave a mild shrug. "We know people with children, so we could probably get some pointers. Uncle H's had half a dozen," he pointed out — which was to say nothing of the fact that he taught at Hogwarts, and therefore probably knew a good deal more about children in general than either of them did.

The other person he knew with a particularly large family was Zelda, but — well. He wasn't sure they were speaking anymore.