Mrs. Doggett came and found her on the stairs. "Get up," she said. "There is something I have got to show you, and I have been thinking about it since nine, and I have decided, and if I am turned off for it, then I am turned off." The gown was in the second attic on the north side in a press, wrapped in linen and paper, and there were four of them.

They were all dark, and they were all extremely good, and the newest of them was eleven years old. Mrs. Doggett took out the wine-red one, heavy silk the color of a good claret, with about nine inches of gold worked at the hem and up the front of the bodice. She held it up and did not say anything for a moment. "Ma'am," said Alice, "whose is that?"

"It was Her Grace's." Alice put her hands behind her back. "Not his mother," said Mrs. Doggett.

"His wife. Lady Sarah. She was married to him three years, and she died in January of '19, and there was a child that did not live either. And this house has had a crape band on the knocker in my head ever since."

Mrs. Doggett turned the gown around. "She was five feet seven and thin and had shoulders like a boy, and so have you. I have been looking at you across this house for five years and thinking it, and being ashamed of myself for thinking it."

Alice said, "Mrs. Doggett, I cannot." "You can."

"I cannot wear his wife's gown to a dinner where they mean to laugh at me." Alice's voice was not entirely under control. "Ma'am, think what it does to him. He has to sit at his own table and watch a housemaid come through that door in Lady Sarah's silk in front of nine people, and there is not one thing he can say about it." Mrs. Doggett laid the gown over her arm.

"Yes," she said. "I have thought about that a great deal since nine this morning, and I want you to hear what I have decided. Then you may do as you please, because it is your Thursday and not mine." She sat down on the press. "I have been in this house twenty-four years. I dressed that lady's hair for the last two of them, and I put her in her coffin, and I have not been able to say her name out loud in this house since, because nobody says it, because he does not say it, and everybody has taken their lead from him for eleven years."

Her chin was up. "He did not say one word on Tuesday night, Verity. Thorne heard the whole of it and told me at eleven, and I have not slept. He sat at his own table and let a woman ask for you to be brought up like a performing dog, and he said, as you please." Alice began, "He may have-" "There is no may have. I am extremely fond of that man, and there is no may have."

Mrs. Doggett stood up. "So he is going to sit at that table on Thursday and he is going to have to look at something, and it is not going to be a girl in a mended cuff, because a girl in a mended cuff is a thing a man can be sorry about for a week and then forget. Let him look at his wife's dress. Let him remember that she would have got up from that table on Tuesday and taken Sowerby apart in front of the lot of them, because she would have, and every soul in this house who is over forty knows it."

The gown fitted through the shoulders and was two inches short, so Mrs. Doggett let down the hem on Wednesday night by candlelight. Alice's hair was done by the upstairs maid, who cried twice and had to be sent out of the room. There was no jewelry, and Mrs. Doggett would not hear of the housekeeper's own garnets being lent. Garnets on a borrowed gown, she said, were a thing that could be laughed at, and the gown alone could not.

At eight on Thursday, the 9th of September, Alice Verity stood outside the dining room at Hollingbourne with her hand on the door handle for about four seconds. Then she opened it. There were nine people at that table, and the room was very bright, and she heard the conversation stop the way a clock stops. Lady Sowerby had turned round with a smile ready, and Alice saw the smile arrive and then saw it fail, not soften, fail, as the woman's eyes went from her face to the gold at the hem and back again.

Mrs. Cardew put her hand over her mouth. At the near end of the table, the Duke of Hollingbourne twisted round in his chair to see who had come in. Alice Verity watched a man of thirty-six look at eleven years of his own life standing in a doorway in the candlelight and go entirely white. He could not say one single word.

Somewhere behind her, in the passage, Mrs. Doggett shut the door. "Good evening, Your Grace," said Alice Verity. "I am told there is a question about Herodotus." There was a place laid, which was the thing Alice had not expected and had no way of preparing for.

A chair stood at the near end on the Duke's left, with a card on it in a footman's hand, because a place had been laid for her the moment Lady Sowerby said Thursday and nobody had thought about it again since. Mr. Thorne pulled the chair out. He did it exactly as he would have done it for a countess, which Alice understood afterward had cost him something. He pushed it in behind her, said, "Madam," very quietly, and went back to the sideboard.

Nine people watched her sit down. Nobody spoke for about six seconds, and it was the longest thing Alice Verity had ever lived through. "Verity," said the Duke of Hollingbourne. His voice was not right, and she heard it, and so did everybody at that table.

"Your Grace." He looked at the gown. "Where did you get that gown?" There it was, four seconds in, and Alice had known it was coming and had decided on the stairs exactly what she was going to do about it: the truth, and nothing round it.

"Mrs. Doggett gave it me this morning, sir, out of the press in the north attic. She told me whose it was before I put it on, and I asked her twice to let me wear my own, and she would not. She said that if she was to be turned off for it, then she was to be turned off. I should like that said in front of everybody at this table before anything else is said at all."