She dismounted and stood at the edge for a long time. He did not speak. When at last she turned he was standing at Absalom's head, holding the horse, and the horse was letting him.
"He's never stood for me before," the Earl said. "Not once, since."
"He's never been asked properly. You grab." She came back and took the reins. "My father said you had good hands and no patience."
"You said. In the box. I've been thinking about it." He did not let go of the bridle. They were standing very close, with the big horse's warm breath between them and the empty white pit at their backs. "I'd like to learn. Patience. If anyone would teach me."
She looked up at him. The pale eyes were serious and tired and entirely without guile, and she felt the same thing she had felt in the yard on the first morning, the anger and the other thing tangled together, except that the anger had worn thinner.
He bent his head. She did not move away. Then, at the last moment, she put her gloved hand flat against his chest.
"Not now," she said. "Not while you're paying a debt to me. I won't be part of your penance, my lord. If you ever do that, I want it to be because of me. Not because of him."
He was still for a moment. Then he stepped back, and bowed, not mockingly, and said, "When the debt's paid, then," and went to mount his bay.
Kit, on the fat mare, had been staring very hard at a rook the whole time.
VIII.
The new inquest sat on the fourteenth of January, in the long room upstairs at the Bell in Driffield, because that was where the old one had sat and Mr. Greaves was a man who liked to put things back where he had found them.
The room was full. Half the farmers of the Wolds had come in, and their wives, and the curate, and two men from the Hull newspapers with their pencils already moving, and a great many people who had no business there at all and had come because an earl was going to stand up in a public house and say he had been drunk. Harriet sat on a bench near the front in the grey gown, which Mrs. Pollitt had let out and taken in and trimmed with black ribbon until it was very nearly her own. Thorne sat beside her. Kit sat beside Thorne, scrubbed raw, his hair flattened with water, sick with fright.