"Were you?"
Frances put down her pen.
"I thought of it," she said. "When I saw the stone. I thought, if I were alone in this room for one minute, with the candle. I thought of it so clearly that I could feel the page in my hand." She looked up at him at last. "And then I thought of my sister standing up in St. Peter Mancroft at eighteen in a borrowed bonnet and putting her name in a book just like this one, so that her child should have a father in the eyes of the law. And I thought, I am not going to be the woman who tore out another woman's wedding."
The Duke took his hand off the register.
He stood looking at her for a moment in the grey light from the vestry window. Then he said, "Miss Blakeney," in a voice she had not heard from him before; and she rose; and she did not afterwards remember which of them had moved first, only that it was a very small room, and that he kissed her with great care, as if he were afraid she might come away in his hands like the page, and that she put her own hand up flat against the black cloth of his coat, over his heart, and felt it going like a drum, and was absurdly comforted to know that he was frightened too.
"That was very wrong of me," said the Duke, against her hair.
"Yes," said Frances. "In a vestry. In front of the registers."
"I meant, before I have anything to offer you but a courtesy title and a lame leg."
"You haven't even got the courtesy title," said Frances. "Younger sons of dukes are Lord Tristram. It isn't a title. It's a description." And she laughed, a little shakily, with her face against his coat, and he laughed too, and in the corner among the hassocks Robin looked up from his soldier and said, with great disgust, "Are you going to do that a lot?"
The Duke wrote his letters that evening in the parlour of the Plough, which was the only inn in Wychcombe, with a smoking fire and a sporting print of a pig over the chimneypiece. Frances sat on the other side of the table and made two fair copies of the entries, one for the Lord Chancellor and one for Garter, and the curate, who had come back from Charlbury muddy to the knees and very frightened of the Duke, signed and attested both of them, and so did Farmer Pratley and Mr. Hine, and Mr. Tuckwell put his mark.