"They are wondering what you see in me," she said.
"Let them wonder. It will do them good. Most of them have not wondered about anything since Christmas." He checked the greys for a barouche full of feathers. "Miss Ivers. I am going to say something, and I would like you to let me say all of it before you answer, because if you answer partway through I may not catch it, and then I will have to guess, and I am very tired of guessing."
"Very well."
"You are the Sister."
She looked at the greys' ears. "Yes."
"I thought so at the ball. I was certain this afternoon. I have the book in my coat." He touched his breast. "It has been there since February. I don't know if you can imagine what it is to find a thing like that in a basket of sermons. I had been to dinner that night at my mother's, with twelve people at the table, and I had not understood one word in four, and I had laughed when the Bishop of Ely told us his sister was dead." His hands were steady on the reins; his voice was not, quite. "I went out afterward and walked until two in the morning, and I went into a shop in Holborn because it was the only one with a light, and I picked up your book because it was the only thing in the basket that was not about sin. And I read, standing up, by a tallow candle, that the deaf are not hard to talk to, the world is merely in the habit of mumbling. And I laughed so hard the bookseller thought I was drunk."
Theodora turned her head and looked at him. He was not looking at her now; he was looking down the long green of the Ring. His profile against the trees was very spare and very tired.
"Waterloo," she said. It was not a question.
"The left ear went at Waterloo. I had a troop of horse artillery on the ridge, and we were firing all afternoon, and at about six o'clock one of the guns burst. I don't remember it. I remember the morning after, and the sound of the world as if somebody had wrapped it in wool. The surgeon said it would come back." The ghost of the smile went past the window again. "It didn't. The right ear was well enough for two years. Then last winter it began to go too. An aurist in Soho Square tells me it will go entirely, perhaps in a year, perhaps in five. He says this cheerfully. I think he is paid by the year."
"Does anybody know?"