"You owe me nothing, Your Grace."
"I owe you a great deal more than an apology, but an apology is where I must begin." He kept his eyes on his daughter. "What Rose said yesterday was true. I asked my mother whether she would stand by you if I asked you to be my wife. I ought not to have spoken to her before I spoke to you. I ought not to have let you learn of it from a child. And I ought, perhaps, to have understood without being told that you were not free to say how you felt. My mother pointed that out to me last night. She was right, which I find I resent a good deal."
Hester felt something in her throat that might have been a laugh or might have been tears.
"Please don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't ask me. Not now. If you ask me now, I shall have to answer, and I don't trust either of us." She looked at him squarely, which cost her more than anything she had done that morning. "You have been lonely for four years, and I have been kind to your daughter. That is a very great deal. But it may not be enough. You do not know me, sir. You know how I am in your nursery, with a basin and a book. You do not know what I am like when I am angry, or proud, or wrong, and I am frequently all three. And I do not know you, except as a man who stands at a window for half an hour every evening and cannot think what to say to his own child."
He took that as she had seen him take very little: without defending himself.
"The letter," he said. "It was a post?"
"In Calcutta. With a family called Carrow. They sail on the fourteenth of next month." She hesitated, and then, because she had decided that morning in the housekeeper's room that she would not be the kind of woman who told half a truth, she told him the rest: her father, the note, the bank, the hundred and ten pounds. She told it flatly, as she would have read out a column of figures.
When she had finished he was silent so long that she thought she had disgusted him.
"I could settle that note by Friday," he said quietly.
"Yes," said Hester. "And then every word I ever said to you afterwards would have a price on it. I should never know, and neither would you, whether I said yes to you or to Mr. Penruddock's ledger." She drew a breath. "It is my debt. I will pay it."
He looked at her for a long moment, and then he did something she had not expected. He bowed to her, not the brief nod a man gives a servant but the full bow he would have given his mother or Lady Arabella Finch.