If the answer is yes, I shall be in the library.
Yours, with a hand that has not been steady since the Peace of Amiens and has never been less so than now,
Adrian.
P.S. The postmark is blank because I carried it down to the study myself, at six this morning, and put it in with the others. I thought it ought to arrive in the proper way.
Clara sat for a very long time with the letter in her lap, and the rain on the window, and her heart doing something very strange and fast and light.
She had read perhaps a quarter of a million letters in her life. She had read letters of love and of grief, of bankruptcy and birth, of triumph and farewell. She knew all the ways in which a person can say one thing and mean another. She knew a lie when she held one.
This was not a lie. This was a man's heart, in his own poor shaking hand, on a sheet of his grandmother's paper, laid in the middle of the post for her to find.
"This," said Clara Whitlow, to the empty study, in a voice that was not quite a whisper and not quite a laugh, "is impossible."
"I assure you," said a voice from the doorway, "that it is not."
She looked up.
He was standing in the study door in his shirt-sleeves, with his hair a little untidy and his black glove off, his scarred hand hanging bare at his side. He had not shaved. He looked tired and frightened and very young, and he was watching her with an expression of such naked, trembling hope that she felt it in her throat like a hand.
"I could not wait in the library," said Adrian. "I tried. I lasted eleven minutes."
She rose. The letter was still in her hand. She did not know what to do with it, so she held it against her heart.
"It is not a question of the answer, my lord," she said, quite steadily, though her voice shook. "It is only that there are a great many reasons why it ought to be no. I have no family. I have no money. I have a mother in a back room in Devizes and an aunt who thinks I am too clever. I am not accustomed to a house of this size. I should make a very poor viscountess."
"You would make an excellent one."