When she came home at a quarter past one, there were roses in the hall at Half Moon Street, white ones, two dozen of them, in a basket nearly as large as the hall itself, and a card propped among them in a strong upright hand, and Lady Ivers was sitting on the bottom stair beside them with the expression of a woman who has seen a vision of the Virgin.
"He is calling," said Lady Ivers. "At three. Today. Theodora, where have you been? Your hair. Go up at once. Wear the blue."
Theodora went up and wore the blue. She stood in front of the looking glass in the little back bedroom she shared with nobody, which was one of the few luxuries of the Season, and watched her own mouth in it, the way she and Piers used to on the nursery floor, and said aloud, without any sound at all, I do not know what you want with me. Then she said it again. Then she went down.
The Duke of Calderwood called at three precisely, and stayed for twenty-two minutes, which Lady Ivers afterward described to her sister in a letter of eleven pages as the most extraordinary twenty-two minutes of her life.
He sat in the yellow chair by the window, with his back to the light, so that the light fell on everyone else. Theodora noticed that at once and admired it. He spoke to Lady Ivers about Wiltshire, and the roads, and the weather, which had been so strange these two years past, the summer that never came and the harvest that failed; and whenever Lady Ivers answered him he turned in the yellow chair and gave her the whole of his attention, and Lady Ivers, who was not used to being given anyone's whole attention, bloomed under it like a geranium in a glasshouse. He spoke to Theodora very little. He looked at her a good deal.
At the eighteenth minute, Piers came in.
He had not been meant to. He had been meant to stay in the back parlour with his Latin, but he was thirteen, and there was a duke in the house, and he came in sideways with an air of having lost a book. Lady Ivers's face closed like a door. "My son," she said, in the voice she used for the mortgage, "Piers. You must forgive him, your Grace, he is — he does not — "
"How do you do," said the Duke, standing, and turning, squarely, to face the boy. And then, slowly, with great care and some clumsiness, like a man writing with his left hand, he lifted his own two hands and spelled on them, letter by letter, in the old two-handed alphabet: G-O-O-D D-A-Y.
The room was entirely silent. Theodora had never heard a silence so loud.