"Stop," said Frances, without moving her lips.
He stopped. Then, because he was six and had been good for an hour, he did the thing she had told him over and over not to do until the service was finished. He leaned forward across the green baize cushion, and looked up into the Duke's face with great interest, as one might look at a horse one has heard a good deal about and wishes to see for oneself.
"You look older," he said.
The Duke turned his head.
"Robin," said Frances.
"I'm only saying. Papa said he was young. Papa said he looked about eleven, at the beginning, in Spain." Robin considered. "He doesn't now."
"I beg your pardon," said the Duke, to the boy, very low. "Who said that?"
And Robin, in the voice of a child who has been rehearsing something for a long time and has at last been given his cue, held up his left hand. On the thumb of it, made to fit with a winding of black wool, was a heavy gold ring with a flat oval bezel of dark red stone, and cut in the stone, small and deep and plain as the day it was made, an otter with a fish in its mouth.
"Papa taught me your name," said Robin. "You're Tristram Everard Stanier, and you were the Major, and now you're the Duke of Halvergate, and you rode a grey horse called Pilgrim and he was shot dead on the eighteenth of June, and you were underneath him, and Papa got you out. And you sing out of tune. Papa said you'd tell me you don't, and I wasn't to believe you."
The curate, in the pulpit, said, "And now to God the Father," and the whole church rose with a great rustle and shuffle, and the Duke of Halvergate did not rise with it. He sat quite still on the green bench, with his hat on his knee, looking at the ring on the boy's thumb; and across the aisle, standing in the household pew with her veil turned back, the Dowager Duchess of Halvergate had seen it too, and her face, which had been chilly, had become something else, something Frances could not read at all, as white as the lawn of her cap.