"Then we had better understand each other now, Mr. Loveday, and save ourselves a great deal later." She was very pleasant about it. "You will not speak of money to her."
"Madam, it is her money."
"It is money coming into my house for work done under my roof by a girl I have kept for eight years out of an income that was left to me and not to her."
"She is not kept. She is maintained. There is a difference, and it is written down."
"You have read my husband's will, have you?"
"No, madam."
"No, and you will not be reading it." Lady Wexford folded her hands. "Let me put the whole of it to you, since you are a plain man. If you find it a hard sentence, take it away and think about it and come back on Tuesday. But you will not speak of money to her. And if you do, you will not come back at all."
Loveday had been driving out to Cleeve Manor for three years for three shillings' worth of paper a month. He thought about the three shillings. Then he thought about what happens to a girl in a stable room when the one man who comes to see her is stopped at the gate. He came back on the Tuesday.
He is not the villain of this. He is a careful old man who chose the smaller of two harms, and was wrong about which one that was.
Cordelia got a different story. She got it standing up in the stable room in under a minute.
"There is a friend of mine in the county who has taken it into her head to want variations made on a tune. She is old, and she is a little foolish about it. She has asked me; I have said you would do it."
"For what?"
"For nothing. It costs nothing, and it is precisely the sort of civility that gets a family remembered."
"On what air?"