"And you make them right."
"I make them so that nobody can see where they went wrong. It is not quite the same thing."
Something happened at the corner of his mouth: not a smile, but the place where one would have been if he had had one about him that night.
"Say that again," he said.
She looked up. She had spoken to perhaps four men above the rank of a shopkeeper in her whole life, and never at a quarter to midnight, and never like this.
"I make a thing look as though nothing ever happened to it," Catherine said. "That is all mending is, Your Grace. The tear is still there. You simply cannot find it."
The four candles were behind him. She could not see his face well; that was probably a mercy on both sides.
"Does it always hold?" he asked.
"No."
"When does it not?"
"When it is put under any weight," she said. "A repair will bear ordinary wear for years. It will not bear being pulled. If you pull, it goes at the mend, because the mend is the only part of the cloth that has already been broken once."
The town clock outside struck the half hour. He turned his head towards the sound.
"Twelve," he said, mostly to himself. "That will do. I said midnight."
He set his glass down on the wreck of the supper table, very precisely in the middle of a ring of wine.