Her aunt was at the urn. Mrs. Letitia Thorley was a handsome, anxious woman who had married a clever man in the expectation of a deanery and had got instead thirty years of Huntingdonshire. She bore it bravely, but she bore it out loud. Her uncle was behind the Stamford Mercury, from which only his hand emerged, at intervals, to find toast.
"You have been out," said Aunt Letitia. "In this damp. Kezia, your chest."
"My chest is very well, Aunt."
"It is not well; it never is in autumn. Barnabas, tell her."
"Your aunt is concerned about your chest, my dear," said the Stamford Mercury.
Kezia sat down. She took a piece of toast and did not butter it. She said, "The Duke is come."
The newspaper came down. Aunt Letitia set the teapot on the tray with a little clatter.
"Come? He is not expected till Monday. Mrs. Oddie told me herself, after church—"
"He came last night. Alone, on a hired horse, I gather, and went straight to the stables because Bathsheba was foaling, and sat up with her all night." Kezia looked at the toast. "I know because I went down to ride Sibyl, and found him there in his shirtsleeves, asleep in the straw, and took him for one of the dealer's men. And then I talked to him for half an hour. About the Duke."
There was a pause.
"What about the Duke?" said her uncle, carefully.
"That he was unbearable." Kezia made herself look up. "Among other things. I told him about his grandmother and the horse-coper and Horncastle fair. And the funeral. And the hounds, and the audit dinner, and Lord Fennimore. And the common. I said that he ought to have the decency not to sign his name to what he would not go and look at. And then Matthew Sowerby came across the yard in his livery and bowed to him as if he were the Prince Regent and gave me a nod as if I were the hayward's donkey, and I understood that I had been describing the Duke of Wendlebury to the Duke of Wendlebury, and that he had let me."
Aunt Letitia sat down quite suddenly in the chair by the urn.