It was a country dance, not a waltz, and for that she was grateful afterward, because a country dance was all pattern and courtesy and long lines of people going down the room, and nobody could expect a woman to talk much while she was concentrating on her feet. She did not talk much. Neither did he. But whenever the figure brought them face to face, he looked at her mouth before he looked at her eyes, and whenever she said anything at all, even "I believe it is your turn to cast off," she found that she was saying it slowly and squarely to him, and that he was watching it arrive.
He danced well, for a soldier. He did not count the beat aloud the way some gentlemen did; she wondered whether he could hear the beat at all, and then saw that he was watching the first violin's bow arm in the gallery over her shoulder, and keeping time by that. It was so neatly done that she wanted to laugh. She did not. She only met his eyes, at the bottom of the set, and let him see that she had seen; and he looked back at her for one long, level moment, and then down, like a man setting down something heavy that he had carried a long way.
At the end of the dance he led her back toward her chair, the long way, around the edge of the floor where the noise was least. Near the Chinese jar he stopped.
"May I ask you something, Miss Ivers?"
"You may ask."
"Have you ever read," he said, "a little book, about so long" — he showed her with his hands, a modest octavo — "printed in Fetter Lane, called A Plain Address to the Families of the Deaf? By a Sister."
Theodora's heart stopped. It did not stop for long. It resumed after a moment with a great deal of noise, the way a clock does when it has been jolted.
"I don't believe so," she said.
"No? It's a curious thing. I found it last winter in a shop in Holborn, in a basket of sermons. I have read it a good many times since." He was still watching her mouth, and she wondered, wildly, what her mouth was doing. "There is a sentence in it I have thought about more than most. Speak to the face, not to the back of the head. It is a small courtesy, and a great mercy." He paused. "I thought tonight, watching you, that you would agree with the author."
"I expect most people would," said Theodora, "if they thought about it."
"Most people don't," said the Duke of Calderwood. He bowed, very correctly, the bow of a man who had been taught it at seven and drilled in it at seventeen. "Good night, Miss Ivers. Thank you for the dance. And for the staircase."