"Then I shall not offer again," he said. "But I shall not stop wishing I could."
V.
Lady Arabella Finch arrived on Thursday in a yellow travelling carriage with two trunks and a small, disdainful pug named Wellington.
She was twenty-eight, tall, fair, and so composed that Hester, glimpsing her from the nursery window as she stepped down onto the gravel, thought at first she must be cold. It was only later, after dinner, when governess and child were sent for to the drawing room as was the custom of the house, that she began to suspect otherwise.
Rose had been scrubbed and brushed and buttoned into her best white frock with the blue sash. She had also been coached for a full hour in her curtsey. At the drawing-room door she looked at the tall fair lady on the sofa beside her grandmother, and at her father standing by the fire, and at the pug, and she did not curtsey at all.
"I have a mama," she announced to the room.
There was a short, terrible silence. Hester felt the blood leave her face. The Dowager's gloved hands went perfectly still in her lap. The Duke took a step forward and stopped.
Lady Arabella set down her coffee cup.
"Do you?" she said, with every appearance of interest. "So have I. Mine lives in Kent and is very fond of telling me what to wear. Is yours fond of that?"
Rose, who had been braced for a scolding, was thrown entirely off her course. "She makes me wear a pinafore over my good frock," she said, after consideration. "Until we come downstairs."
"Very sensible. Wellington once ate a pinafore. Would you like to see him do his trick? He can sit up, if there is a biscuit in it, and only if."
And that was that. Rose spent the next quarter of an hour on the hearthrug with the pug, and the grown persons talked of the roads from Kent, and the Dowager did not look at Hester once, and the Duke did not look anywhere else.
Hester was putting Rose's books away in the schoolroom an hour later when there was a knock at the open door, and Lady Arabella came in without waiting to be asked. She had a candle in one hand and the pug under her arm.