"I wish to apologize," he said. She blinked. "For what?" "For what I said on the terrace. I—" He stopped. The precision he usually brought to sentences was, she noticed, absent. He tried again.
"I said something unguarded. I should not have—" "You said you were good at not beginning," she said. Yes, I thought it was the most honest thing you'd said since the pond. He looked at her. She held his gaze.
I don't think you need to apologize for honesty, she said. Honesty is the thing people apologize for when they're frightened of it. The thing itself doesn't require the apology. He was quiet for a moment that held weight. The library was very still.
Outside the October garden moved in the wind, and a branch of something tapped against the window in the irregular rhythm of things that have no agenda. "Miss Bramwell," he said. "Yes?" "I find your company..." He stopped. The rest of the sentence was present in the room. She could feel it there, much like feeling a word you cannot quite retrieve at the edge of articulation.
And then he made a decision and said, "Worth considerably more than the inconvenience of a recurring duck." It was clearly not the sentence he had started. It was the sentence he had substituted when the original became too much. She recognized this, too, from her years with her father, who had also been a man of managed honesty. "That," she said, "is the most ducal compliment I have ever received in a library." The lines around his storm blue eyes rearranged themselves into a configuration she had not seen before. It lasted approximately two seconds, and then he brought it back under management, but two seconds was enough to see it clearly.
"I meant—" he said. "I know what you meant," she replied. She leaned forward slightly, her hands folded on the desk. "I find your company worth considerably more than having dry feet, which, given what I went through for the duck, is saying something." He looked at her. She watched the familiar sequence begin, the warming, the awareness of the warming, and then the retreat, the slight straightening, the return to formality, the reestablishment of the careful, correct distance. "You are very generous, Miss Bramwell," he said in the formal voice of a man reassembling himself.