Her aunt and uncle exchanged a look—a long, married look, which Kezia had seen before and which always meant that a conversation had happened without her.
"Mr. Quarrendon called last week," said her uncle at last. "While you were at the Gotobeds'. He brought the heads of the bill. If the enclosure goes forward, the rector's tithes are to be extinguished and an allotment of land given in lieu. Ninety-two acres, my dear, on the high ground above Coldwell, in fee. It would make the living worth something near five hundred a year, in a bad season, instead of the two hundred and forty we have been getting with the wheat sprouting in the stook." He put his spectacles back on. "I have not signed anything. I said I would think. Your aunt—"
"I said," said Aunt Letitia, with a faint flush, "that we are not young, Barnabas, and that when you are gone Kezia will have forty pounds a year and a trunk of court rolls, and that ninety-two acres would be ninety-two acres. That is all I said. It is not wicked to want a roof."
Kezia sat very still. Outside, the rain had begun again, softly, on the laurels.
"No," she said at last. "It isn't wicked." She found she could not say anything more, and so she said nothing, and her uncle went back behind the Mercury, and her aunt poured her a cup of tea she did not drink.
At a little after three o'clock that afternoon, Dinah came up from the kitchen with her apron over her arm and her eyes as round as saucers to say that there was a gentleman at the front door, walking, without a horse or a servant or even an umbrella, and he had said to tell Miss Thorley that it was Mr. Carrick come about the horses, in a manner of speaking, and would she see him.
VI.
Aunt Letitia received him in the front parlour with every appearance of composure and a degree of internal agitation that made her bracelets ring. He was wet. He had walked across the park in a fine drizzle in his plain Dublin coat and a hat that had seen better counties, and he stood dripping on the Turkey rug and apologised for it, and then, before Aunt Letitia could say anything about the living, apologised to her niece.
"I said it this morning, Miss Thorley," he said. "I'm saying it again in front of a witness, so it'll be on the record. I knew who I was and I let you think otherwise, and I'd no right to. That's the whole of it. I'll not dress it up."
"You are very good, Your Grace," began Aunt Letitia, "but I am sure my niece—"
"Your niece will speak for herself, I think, ma'am," said the Duke, "since she does it so well." And then, catching himself: "I beg your pardon. That sounded like a jab. It wasn't meant for one."
"It sounded like a compliment," said Kezia, from the window seat, "which is worse." She had not risen when he came in. She had decided beforehand that she would not, and now that he was here, sodden and plain and unexpectedly diffident, she found the resolution harder to keep than she had expected, and kept it anyway. "Why have you come, Your Grace? Not only to apologise. You did that very handsomely in the yard."
He looked at her, and then he took a folded paper out of the breast of his coat. It was damp at the edges.