"So that I can be your ears. So that nobody need ever know." She heard her own voice, very clear and slow, every consonant in its place. She could not have mumbled now if she had tried. "Your Grace, have you read my book? You have read it a good many times, you told me. Did you read the part where I wrote that the worst thing we do to a deaf child is teach him that his deafness is a thing to be hidden? That every time we tell him to put his hands down, we tell him he is a shame to us? I wrote that for my mother. I didn't think I should ever have to say it to you."
He had gone white about the mouth. "That is not — "
"You want me to sit at your right hand every night of my life and be the hands that hide you." She stood up. She had not meant to. "And my school would be a duchess's charity, that I visited on Tuesdays in a carriage, and somebody else would sit at the deal table, because I should be at yours. You'd buy it for me. You'd buy it with the very thing I wrote it to stop." She found that her eyes were full and furiously refused to let them spill. "I can't. I'm sorry. I would rather have twenty-three pounds and a room above a cooper's shop."
For a long moment he did not move. Then he stood too, slowly, and she saw him try to say something, and saw his mouth make the shape of a word and abandon it, and make another, and abandon that. He was not, she understood, a man who had ever had to find words quickly. He had always had time, in the army, to be quiet.
"I see," he said at last. "I have made a very great mistake, Miss Ivers. I beg your pardon." And he bowed, the bow he had been taught at seven, and went out, and she heard the street door close behind him, and she sat down again at the window table and put her face in her hands.
She had perhaps an hour of being miserable in peace. Then Mrs. Pelling called.
It was later clear that Mrs. Pelling had not known about the proposal; she had only been waiting, with the patience of a heron, for the best moment to say what she had come to say, and she could not possibly have chosen better. She had been, she said, in Fleet Street on Saturday last, on an errand to her late husband's man of business, and she had been so very surprised to see dear Miss Ivers coming out of a printing house at the top of Fetter Lane, quite alone, without her maid, and with — she lowered her voice — with a gentleman. A gentleman whom everybody knew. She would not dream of mentioning it to a soul, naturally. She only thought a mother ought to know.