That in itself was an event: the Duke of Fenwood's carriage stood in the market square outside a linen draper's for a quarter of an hour, and every soul in Wormsley found business at a window. Mrs. Locksley took one look out of the shop door, went upstairs, and shut herself in the cutting room. It was the most useful thing anybody did in Wormsley that day.
He asked Catherine to walk out with him, and they walked in full view along the churchyard path where the whole town could see them and nobody could hear.
"I have had Startin down," he said. "He has been three days at Farcourt, and he has read the aunt's affidavit."
"Is it bad?"
"It is accurate. That is what is bad about it." He walked with his hands behind his back. "Every fact in it is true, and every conclusion in it is wrong. And I am told that is the most dangerous species of document there is." They came to the corner where the yews stand. "Startin says there is one answer, and he says it plainly, as he says everything: the Master will not take a child from a settled household, and a household is settled when there is a mistress in it. If I were married by the eighteenth, or under an engagement that could be sworn to, Mrs. Marfleet's case falls to pieces in a morning."
Catherine kept walking, because stopping would have been an answer of its own.
"Miss Hathstone." He stopped anyway. "Will you marry me?"
The rooks went over the churchyard. She had thought about the possibility for perhaps eight days, in the way one thinks about the sea when one has never seen it. She had never got as far as imagining it beside a wall of yews at two in the afternoon.
"Why?" she said.
"Because it would settle the question of the child."
He heard it as he said it; she watched him hear it.
"No," he said at once. "That is not—"
"It is what you said."