Outside the October garden was going about its quiet business, and the willows at the pond were visible through the south window, their branches moving in the light wind with the meditative patience of things that have been there a long time and expect to remain. "I had things planned," he agreed. However, he did not finish the sentence. He set his own cup down with the deliberateness that she was learning to read as his tell. The small precise action he performed when being very careful about something adjacent to what he was saying.
He looked at her with those storm blue eyes in the October drawing room light and she thought he is not going to say the rest of the sentence but the rest of the sentence exists and that is interesting. "However?" she prompted gently. "They can wait," he said. Dioynes returned on Friday. Thomas, who had retrieved him on Thursday with a considerable expenditure of bread and patience, and a full hour of demonstrating left-handed offering technique to a duck, who regarded him with the evaluating attention of a test examiner, had personally returned Dioynes to Hullbrook House.
He handed him to the kitchen boy with specific instructions and was offered a piece of cake by Miss Bramwell, which he accepted because it seemed ungracious to decline, and because it was, in his considered estimation, an excellent piece of cake. He reported to Mr. Holt that the visiting Miss was, in his considered opinion, a good sort. Mr. Holt received this assessment with the neutrality of a man who had formed his own assessment, and preferred to let it develop privately. On Friday morning, the pen gate was open again. Felicity had checked the latch on Thursday evening, and it was a perfectly functional latch.
The only explanation that accounted for the physical reality of the situation was that Dioynes had spent the night in patient experimentation with the mechanism and had identified the solution, which was the kind of capability she found she could entirely believe in. This time she was ready. She had borrowed Constance's old garden boots, which were approximately her size, and she took the path along the stream rather than cutting across the meadow. She brought bread wrapped in cloth, and she arrived at the Alifford side of the stream at nine, accompanied by better boots and a clearer plan. She found Dioynes in the pond.
She also found the Duke. He wasn't at the pond. He was twenty feet from the pond in the walled kitchen garden, whose gate stood open, engaged in what appeared to be an earnest conversation with Henderson, who was the kind of old gardener that very old gardens produce. A man grown to fit his vocation so precisely that the vocation and the man had become indistinguishable. The Duke had his hands behind his back and was looking at the east wall with the focused attention of someone who genuinely cared about what a wall was doing.
He noticed her at the garden gate. He looked at the pond. He looked at her. She held up the cloth wrapped bread by way of explanation, and he looked at the bread, and something in his expression settled in a way she could not quite name. Not warmer, exactly, but less managed.