[Lorna hasn't had much time to herself as of late - between work, her duties at home, and practicing her reading and arithmetic, there's been very little opportunity to simply sit down and catch her breath.]

[Today, she's managed to steal a few moments to work on one of her appliques. She has the perfect picture in her mind - a small grouping of flowers made of lace and shimmering arachne silk, each petal individually layered just so.]

[She realizes quite quickly that she might have been a little overly ambitious in her planning, but there's no turning back now. All she can do is keep trying to bring her vision to life, even if that means setting the project aside for a bit and coming back to it later with a fresh set of eyes.]

[She takes the sudden knock at her door as a sign that the time to do that is now.]

Elsa?

[She sets the applique on her desk before hurrying over to the door. She would have simply given Elsa permission to come inside, but she knows how uncomfortable the poor dear can sometimes feel about little things like this. It speaks volumes of the sort of life she's lived, that even the simplest of exchanges can be wrought with such uncertainty.]

I wasn't expecting you home so soon - is everything alright?