"Send the men away."
He looked up.
"They are standing behind you," Catherine said. "And every time you begin, you hear a man breathe and you stop. I have been in service in a way all my life, and I know that sound. There is nobody in this house who does not already know exactly what I am and what you have paid me. Their being here is not protecting either of us; it is only making a play of it."
One second, two seconds, three.
"Both of you," said the Duke. "Go and have your supper. Leave the dishes and shut the door."
They went. The room seemed to double in size.
"Better," he said. "Considerably."
"Now what?"
"Now nothing, Your Grace. We eat the mutton."
And they ate the mutton in a quiet that lasted three or four minutes and was not agony.
"That was easier," he said at the end of it, in the tone of a man noting a measurement.
"Yes," said Catherine, and neither of them made anything of it.
At 8:00, they went into the drawing room, and she took out her work, and the evening changed. She had brought Lady Ellen's pelisse in a bronze-green merino that the child had chosen herself out of nine patterns, after twenty minutes of the most serious deliberation Catherine had ever witnessed in a human being.