During their free time after dinner, the two boys were clicking away, practicing their embroidering.
"I've come this far with this stitching, and I've just now realized something," said Cain.
"What's that?" asked Ilvalino.
Cain was staring at the cloth fastened to his embroidery frame. It was full of threads sewn into it. He had sewn lines with stitches five millimeters apart.
He muttered, "How is this running stitch any different from just regular sewing?"
"What do you mean… It is just sewing, isn't it?" asked Ilvalino.
Ilvalino had never tried embroidering before, but he had experience with mending clothes at the orphanage. He saw what Cain was working on, and realized that it was, in fact, simply sewing.
"'Push the needle through the cloth from above, and then pull it back through the cloth, five millimeters away. Repeat this process in a line, and try to keep the line straight.' That's what the book said to do, and so I did it," said Cain.
"Yeah, that's sewing," said Ilvalino.
"Am I reading this wrong, maybe…?" asked Cain.
If the thread is thick enough and you can make out a pattern, then even if you're just sewing, you can call it embroidery, I guess," said Ilvalino.
"Exactly!" said Cain. He seemed satisfied with this realization, and turned the page in his book. He decided he would challenge himself with the next stitching method.
Ilvalino was trying to copy his a design from his book onto his cloth, and was working on a bordering with a chain stitch.
"How is a backstitch any different from sewing the front and back of something?" asked Cain.
"Again… Yeah, it's the same thing," said Ilvalino.
"Well, in the world of embroidery, they apparently call it backstitching."
"That's fine, whatever."
Cain filled up his cloth with backstitching from one end to the other, then folded it over, and backstitched it from end to end, yet again. He repeated this process over, and by the time he was finished, he was able to backstitch in a straight line with all of his stitches perfectly equidistant from each other.
When he looked over the finished product, he mumbled, "All right," to himself, removed the cloth from the frame, and attached a brand new cloth to the frame, and started to work on that.
"You've been going at that same thing, pretty steadily," said Ilvalino, picking up Cain's first cloth and taking a look at it. "You really think you'll be ready for the meeting at this rate?" he asked.
Ilvalino's cloth in his embroidery frame had the chain stitch's design traced around the edge, and he had covered about a third of the design with thread. It appeared he was trying to get through the design using a chain stitch with large gaps between stitches.[Read this novel and other amazing translated novels from the original source at the "Novel Multiverse dot com" website @ novelmultiverse.com]
"Slow and steady wins the race," said Cain, "If I get the basics down right now, I think it'll be easier on me later."
"I'm actually pretty impressed by that side of you…" said Ilvalino.
"I said I think," said Cain.
"Then again," said Ilvalino, "I can't really fully respect you when I think about the fact that you're doing all this just to prevent a delusional situation you've come up with where Diana gets married to the crown prince."
Ilvalino was thinking that it would be really weird for the crown prince to be set up with a random noble girl in the first place. There were countless other highborn ladies, after all. So, to him, it was crazy to be convinced that Diana would definitely be chosen as the crown prince's future bride. He thought this whole ordeal with the embroidery meeting was extremely unnecessary.
Cain knew that Ilvalino wouldn't accept his explanation that "There are no other girls as adorable as Diana, so of course she's going to be chosen!" So, he just kept that comment to himself.
"Well, it's a good excuse to learn this skill, anyways," said Cain, "It's always better to know how to do something than to not know how to do it. And, Ilvalino, if you learn how to embroider, you could teach the girls at the orphanage, too, right?"
Ilvalino didn't respond.
"If they learned how to embroider, that would bring them more opportunities for apprenticeship and jobs, right? If they're hired as seamstresses instead of just general servants, that would raise their chances of success in life, you know."
"…Cain-sama," said Ilvalino.
"If you're gonna give your earnings to the orphanage, you might as well give them some of it in the form of tangible cloth and embroidery materials. That way, there's less of a chance that it'll end up in the hands of some adult at the temple," said Cain.
Recently, Cain and Ilvalino had paid the orphanage a visit, thinking they could read the children some books. When they got there, though, they saw that the "Book for Learning Letters" that Cain had left on the shelf was gone.
While it was true that books were circulated widely, for commoners, a book was a valuable possession. Selling even a used book could net someone a considerable sum of money.
The children didn't say anything about it, but Cain assumed that an adult working at the orphanage stole it and sold it off.
Ilvalino unfastened his unfinished cloth from his embroidery frame, and replaced it with a new cloth.
"I'm going to start over and learn the basics, too," he said.
"Is that so," said Cain.
The two of them clicked away at their respective cloths for a while.
Ilvalino stitched from one end of his frame to the other, looped the thread underneath the cloth, and then snipped the thread with a pair of scissors.
"Cain-sama – Thank you," mumbled Ilvalino, looking down and keeping his eyes on his cloth.
"You're welcome," said Cain.
Ilvalino continued to gaze down at his cloth, and he didn't notice that Cain was smiling at him, warmly.