She did not press it. She understood now the precise shape of the thing she was dealing with. It was not coldness. It was the architecture of someone who had been cold for so long that the architecture had become structural, and he could not simply choose to remove it without the whole thing requiring support. "Will you stay for luncheon?" she said instead.
He looked genuinely startled, as if the continuation of a morning into something as ordinary as a meal had not been something he had allowed himself to anticipate. "If it is not inconvenient," he said. "Constance will be finished with her letter by noon," Felicity said, and called for Mrs. Lawson, and went to find her cousin. She was leaving on Saturday. This was not new information. She had always been leaving on Saturday, since the plan had been November at Hullbrook and November was arriving, but by Wednesday it had acquired a different quality, much like a date on a calendar becomes a different object once it is close enough to be felt rather than merely known.
Constance was occupied on Wednesday morning with a letter from Bath that required her complete attention and considerable composure. So Felicity walked to Alifford alone, as she had been doing every morning for a week and a half, in the old garden boots she had quietly adopted as her own. She brought bread. She took the stream path. She arrived to find Dioynes in the pond and the lower garden empty.
This had not happened before. On every other morning she had found either the Duke in the walled garden or on the path or visible from the pond, and the pattern of the mornings had organized itself around that reliable coincidence. She had not until this morning noticed that she had been organizing herself around it. She stood at the pond and offered bread, and Dioynes accepted it. The morning was cold and clear and utterly quiet, except for the willows and the distant work sounds of the estate.
She was thinking about Saturday in the way one thinks about things that are approaching, whether or not one thinks about them. When she heard footsteps on the path behind her, they were slightly faster than usual. Not running, he would not run, she thought. He was not a man who ran toward things. He had spent too many years practicing the opposite, but the walk of a man who has realized he is late for something and has not yet fully committed to being late or being on time.
She turned. He stopped when he saw her. He was wearing a dark gray coat over his morning clothes, and his dark hair was not quite as organized as usual, as if he had come out in haste without completing the organizing, which was the most informal she had ever seen him. "You're here," he said. "I am," she replied.