"At night."
Lady Ellen came the whole way in over the cold floor and stood at Catherine's chair and put her hand on the bronze-green wool and stroked it once. "That is my green," she said. "I chose it."
"You did."
The child stood there and did not ask for anything. She simply stood in the middle of a lit room at a quarter past eleven at night, with her hand on a piece of cloth, the fire going, two grown people not sending her away. It was so obviously the best thing that had happened to her in sixteen months that Catherine had to look very hard at her own stitching.
"Uncle."
"Yes."
"Is she coming again?"
The Duke of Fenwood stood on his own hearthrug in his own house and did not answer for four full seconds. "I do not know," he said. "That is not for me to say by myself."
Nell considered this and evidently found it satisfactory, which told Catherine a good deal about what the child had been told in her life. "Good night," she said, and went out.
They listened to her feet going up the stairs, both of them, without pretending otherwise.
The house had no way of telling the time in it. Catherine had not understood until she had sat in that drawing room for five hours what stopped clocks actually do to a room: there is no quarter hour and no sound at the half; the evening does not move, it only gets later, and you find out how much later by looking at the candles. He took out his watch at some point after the child had gone and looked at it, and did not say what it said.
At last he stood up. "Miss Hathstone."
She looked up with the needle in her hand.