— make itself pleasant, and patient, and blank — and then, quite suddenly, stop doing it, as though he had looked at the blankness and decided it was not worth the trouble. He looked at her as he was: tired, and uncertain, and glad. Then Lady Ivers swept her away to a chair by a pillar, and the music began, and he did not come.
It was at supper that it happened. Theodora was never sure afterward whether Lord Selby had planned it or merely seen his chance; she thought, on the whole, merely seen it, because he was a man who saw chances, the way some men see coins on a pavement. The supper room was long and lit by a hundred candles and very loud. The Duke stood at the head of the long table, with his cousin on his left hand, and somebody proposed the health of the Dowager, and everybody drank; and then Lord Selby, smiling, turned his face a little away, toward the company and away from his cousin's eyes, and said in a pleasant, carrying voice to the gentlemen near him, "I hear Calderwood means to speak on the poor law bill next session. Perhaps he'll move an amendment for the deaf and dumb. He takes such an interest." And then, still turned away, to the Duke's left ear, the dead one, in exactly the same easy tone: "Don't you, Calderwood?"
There was a little laughter, uncertain, the laughter of people who are not sure what the joke is but feel that there must be one.
The Duke did not answer. He had not heard. Theodora, twenty feet away by the pillar with an ice going soft in her hand, had read every word of it on Lord Selby's mouth, and she saw the Duke see the laughter without the words, and saw him begin, by reflex, to make his face pleasant and patient and blank —
Then he stopped. He turned, slowly, not his head but his whole body, squarely, like a gun being laid, until he was facing his cousin directly, and he said in a voice that reached the end of the supper room without seeming to try:
"I beg your pardon, Selby. You were standing on my deaf side. It is a poor place to stand, if you wish to be answered."
The supper room went quiet the way a church goes quiet, all at once and from the back.
"I lost the hearing of my left ear at Waterloo," said the Duke of Calderwood, "and I am losing the right. I am told it will go entirely, in a year or in five. I have not said so before, because I was ashamed, and because I was taught that a man in my position does not stumble where anyone can see. I find I was taught wrong." He paused. He was very pale, and perfectly steady. "So if any of you would like to tell me anything, now or in the House next session, I