The Duke of Hollingbourne put down his glass. "Nobody is being turned off," he said. "Thank you, sir." He stopped, visibly having a certain amount of difficulty. "Verity, I am not going to discuss this at this table." "No, sir."

"Well," said Lady Sowerby brightly into the silence. "Herodotus." Alice turned to her. She had thought about the four questions on the back stairs on Wednesday morning for about half an hour and then stopped, because she had understood that thinking about them was the trap.

There was no answer that won. A wrong answer was the entertainment everybody had come for. A right answer was a performing dog doing its trick, which was the same entertainment with better manners. So she had decided to do the third thing.

"Ma'am," said Alice Verity, "before you ask it, may I say something? I shall be four sentences." Lady Sowerby gave a small gesture. "By all means." Alice folded her hands in her lap.

"You are going to ask me four questions, and I shall very likely answer two of them and get two wrong. You said so at this table on Tuesday night when I was standing at that sideboard with the sauce." Alice heard somebody's fork stop. "I was in the room, ma'am. I have been in the room for five years. That is the first thing I wanted said."

"The second is that I am not ashamed of anything I have read, and I shall answer whatever you ask me as well as I am able. But I should like the table to know that I know what this is, and that I came anyway, and that I am not being taken in. Because tomorrow you will all say she was a good sport and knew no better, and I would rather you said she knew perfectly well."

Nobody said anything at all. Lady Sowerby had gone a slow, deep, unbecoming red, and Alice watched it happen and felt no satisfaction whatever, which surprised her a great deal. "That is three," said Mrs. Cardew. "Ma'am, you said four sentences. That was three."

"So it was," said Alice. "The fourth is that I have never read one word of Herodotus because there is no Herodotus at Hollingbourne. There is a Thucydides in the second case with the boards off, and somebody has written in the margins of it in pencil in a woman's hand, and I have read that four times, and I should very much like to know who wrote in it."

At the near end of the table, the Duke of Hollingbourne made a sound. It was not a word. Alice never found out what it was going to be because he put his hand over his mouth and turned his face away toward the fire. Mrs. Cardew said, quite loudly, that she had heard the pheasant at Hollingbourne was the best in Kent, and eleven people began talking at once.

The dinner lasted two hours and eleven minutes, and Alice Verity got through it. She was asked, in the end, one question about the Romans by a Mr. Bethune, who was seventy and deaf and entirely well-meaning. She answered it, and he said, "Ha," and told her a story about a tutor he had had in 1774, which lasted through the whole of the second course. Alice was profoundly grateful for it.

Lady Sowerby did not speak to her again. At half past ten, the ladies rose, and Alice rose with them because she did not know what else to do. She got as far as the door before she understood that she could not possibly go into the drawing room and could not possibly go back down to the kitchen in that gown either. Mrs. Cardew took her arm in the passage.

"Come and sit in the small parlor with me for a quarter of an hour," she said, "and then Doggett will take you up, and I shall tell everybody you were faint. Do not argue with me, child. I am fifty-one, and I have got you out of that room, and you may thank me in the passage." Alice sat in the small parlor and shook for eleven minutes.

"Now," said Mrs. Cardew, "the Thucydides. That was Sarah." Alice looked at her. "Ma'am?"

"Lady Sarah Hollingbourne wrote in the margins of every book in that house, in pencil, and argued with all of them. She was my cousin."

Mrs. Cardew was looking at the fire. "I have not been in this house in eleven years, and I came this week because Hollingbourne wrote and asked me to, which he has never done, and I have been sitting at that table for four days trying to work out what he wanted." Alice asked, "And do you know now?" "I have not the least idea," said Mrs. Cardew.

"But he wrote to me in August, and Sowerby made her joke on Tuesday, and you came through that door tonight, and I am fifty-one years old and I do not believe in as many coincidences as I used to." Alice did not answer. She was too tired to make sense of any of it. Mrs. Cardew let the silence stand.

The Duke of Hollingbourne sent for her at eleven the next morning. Alice went in her own gray stuff gown with the mended cuff because she had thought about that for most of the night and had decided that going in anything else would be a kind of argument. He was standing at the library window and did not turn round for a moment. "Verity." "Your Grace."