Chapter 23

"In my mother's drawing room last month, at her own table, that woman was mocked in front of ten people, and every one of you who was not in that room has repeated the story since." He waited. Somebody's horse blew. "I was in that room. I knew the sentence. I stopped to count what it would cost me. And by the time I finished counting, she was at the door."He put his hat back on."So I am saying it now, four minutes late and four weeks late, and in front of all of you. And I am saying it with nothing to gain by it, because she is at the far gate doing her work, and she cannot hear a word of this.""She can, actually," said Lord Mowbray.Edmund turned around.She stood twenty feet behind him. She had come up the field with the black stallion while he was speaking, and the whole line of twelve gentlemen watched her do it, and not one of them warned him until she stood close enough to hear every word. She stood in the frost with the rope slack in her hand, and her right ear turned away, and her face absolutely still.A rook called from the elms behind the kennels."Well," said Augusta Vane from the top of the field, in a voice that carried perfectly well and cracked exactly once in the middle, "he has never in his life been able to finish a sentence in front of company. You may as well let him try."Edmund crossed the frost. He did not hurry. He came at her from the left side, because he learned that in a muddy yard at six o'clock in the morning, and he never forgot it. He stopped at the near side of the horse with his hands open and low at his sides, exactly where she put him, three feet from an animal that put three men on their backs, and he waited the way she taught him, without saying anything at all.Corvus turned his head and breathed on the back of his hand."Miss Harrow," he said."Your Grace."

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