Adelheid Marfleet looked down at a finger's width of faded silk and put out one hand and touched the cording. She read the three lines under it, and then the fourth, written by a girl of nineteen in the November of the year fifteen: She took her own shawl off the chair and put it round my shoulders because the room was cold.
"She always did that," Mrs. Marfleet said. "All her life. She did it to me when I was—" She did not finish it. She sat in a strange drawing room with her sister's gown under her fingers and wept without any noise at all, the way women of forty-four weep in company.
The Duke of Fenwood got up, went round the table, and put his hand on her shoulder. It was the first time in sixteen months that anybody in that family had touched anybody at all.
The door opened four inches. Lady Ellen Rushmere came in over the cold floor in her nightgown, with her hair down her back, and looked at the four of them.
"There is talking downstairs," she said.
Then she came the whole way in, past her uncle, past the gentleman from London, and stood at Mrs. Marfleet's knee and put her small hand flat on the open page, on the blue next to her aunt's.
Mr. Sherard sat very still and did not write anything down. He wrote afterwards in a report that is still folded in a deed box at Farcourt that he had been thirty years about that work and had learned to distrust everything a house showed him after 7:00; he had never before seen the whole question of a suit answered by a child crossing a carpet.
The petition was not tried. Mrs. Marfleet withdrew it in the January on terms she wrote out in her own hand, and they were not soft ones: Lady Ellen Rushmere was to go to Bristol from the first of May to the end of July every year until she was seventeen. There was to be a letter every week from Farcourt, and it was not to be four lines on estate paper; it was to say what the child had said and done and wanted, or Mrs. Marfleet would know the reason why. Patrick signed it without reading past the first clause. Three months of every year. He never afterwards pretended it had not cost him, and Catherine loved him for the not pretending rather more than for the giving.
He came to Wormsley on the fourth of February, and this time he did not ask her to walk out where the town could see: he came into the shop, took off his hat, and stood among the bolts of calico like any other man in the county.
"It is settled," he said. "The child stays, and the aunt is satisfied. My solicitor has gone back to London, and there is not one legal reason on this earth for me to be standing in this shop."
Mrs. Locksley went upstairs to the cutting room and made a great deal of noise on the way.
"Miss Hathstone," Patrick said, "there is no report and no gentleman coming. There is nothing whatever to be settled by it. Will you marry me?"
Catherine stood with her hands full of unbleached calico. "Say the reason," she said.