It was Matthew Sowerby, in his plum-coloured livery and his powdered hair, picking his way across the swept path with a covered jug in one hand and a message, evidently, on the tip of his tongue. Mrs. Oddie had sent up chocolate. He came to a halt three yards off and drew himself up and began, from long habit and Mr. Hendry's drilling, to turn to his master.
The Duke straightened from the half-door before he could. He turned, not to Matthew but to Kezia, and took off his hat in the falling snow, and bowed to her—not the slight bow a duke gives a rector's niece, nor even the bow a gentleman gives a lady in an assembly room, but a deep, slow, formal bow from the waist, one hand at his breast, the bow Matthew had given him in that same yard on the morning she had called him unbearable.
Matthew Sowerby stood with his jug and his mouth open. Then, being a good boy and quick, he bowed too, to both of them at once, so deeply that a little of his powder came off and fell on the snow.
Kezia looked at the bent head of the Duke of Wendlebury, with the snowflakes settling in his hair, and felt her face grow warm in the cold, and did not look away.
"That is very handsome, Your Grace," she said. "It does not settle anything."
"I didn't mean it to." He straightened. "I've not asked you what you think of me. I'm keeping to that. But I'd like to know when I may."
Kezia thought of Sir Lionel at Huntingdon, and the spring session, and the five cottages, and the mortgages, and the long wet winter coming down over the common, and her aunt by the drawing-room window with nothing in her hands. None of it was settled. Very little of it, she suspected, would be settled by Lady Day.
"By Lady Day," she said, "I shall have calendared the court rolls as far as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and you will have gone through another quarter's accounts, and we shall both know a great deal more than we do now. You may ask me then whether you are bearable."
"And until then?"
"Until then," said Kezia Thorley, and took the jug of chocolate from Matthew's hands, because he seemed to have forgotten he was holding it, "you may come to the estate office on Thursdays and be told that you are wrong."
The Duke put his hat back on. Behind him, in the straw, Horncastle sneezed.
"Thursday, then," he said.