"I have been up since four," he said, "and I have written eleven letters that I have burned, and I am going to do this extremely badly, and I would take it as a kindness if you would let me get to the end before you say anything." "Yes, sir." He drew a breath.

"On Tuesday night, a woman at my table asked for a servant of mine to be brought up and set a puzzle in front of nine people for sport." He turned around. He looked as though he had not been to bed at all. "And I said, as you please. I have been three days looking for a way to make that into something better than what it is, and there is not one."

"I did not refuse her because refusing her would have made a scene in my own dining room, and I would rather have had you humiliated on Thursday than have been uncomfortable on Tuesday. That is the whole of it, and there is no part of it I can dress." Alice said nothing. "I have been eleven years not making scenes," said the Duke of Hollingbourne. "It is the only thing I have got any good at."

He came away from the window. "Now the gown. I want to say two things, and the first is that Doggett was right, and I have told her so this morning." His jaw was tight. "She has been in this house twenty-four years, and she has watched me not say my wife's name since '19, and she took the only means she had of making me look at it, and it worked. I have not been so angry in eleven years, and I have not once been angry with her."

Alice began, "Sir, I ought never to have-" "You ought to have. And you did. And you did it in front of the only nine people in England who would understand exactly what it meant." He put his hands behind his back. "Verity, do you know what I did on Thursday night?"

Alice waited. "I sat at my own table and looked at a housemaid in Sarah's gown and could not speak, and every person in that room believed I was appalled. And I was not appalled. I was-" He stopped. "I have not seen that color in eleven years," he said.

"That is the whole of it. There is no more to it than that, and it is not to be made anything of. I am telling you because you are the only person alive who is entitled to know why I could not answer you at my own table." The clock in the hall struck the quarter. He let the sound pass before speaking again.

"The second thing about the gown," said the Duke, "is that it is yours. Not to wear. I am aware that would be grotesque, and I am not asking it. It is yours to sell or to cut up or to keep in a press for forty years and never look at. Doggett will bring you the other three this afternoon, and you will do as you please with all four, and I would rather they went out of this house."

"Your Grace, I cannot take-" "You can, and here is why, and then I shall have finished." He looked at her directly. "Because if I keep them, then in eleven years' time some other housekeeper will find them in some other attic, and there will be another Thursday. I have kept four gowns in a box and said nothing for eleven years, and it has not been grief, Verity. It has been cowardice with a black band round it. Doggett proved that to me in front of nine people two nights ago."

Alice Verity stood in the library where she had read 900 books at six in the morning. "May I say the thing now, sir?" "Please." She looked at him squarely.

"I do not want the gowns," said Alice. "I should like a great many other things, and I shall be perfectly honest with you about what they are, but not those. If you make me take them, I shall sell them, and you would rather not know what for." The Duke asked, "Then what?"

"I should like leave to read in this room in writing," said Alice Verity. "Signed, so that when you are dead or married or gone to London, the next person cannot turn me out of it. I should like an hour of my own time a day that is not at six in the morning. And I should like to know who wrote in the margin of the Thucydides, because Mrs. Cardew told me last night, and I would rather hear it from you."

The Duke of Hollingbourne looked at her for a long moment. "Sit down," he said, "and I shall tell you about my wife. And then I am going to ask you something, and you are entirely free to refuse it, and it will cost you nothing whatever."

Lady Sarah Hollingbourne had been twenty-three when she married and twenty-six when she died, and she had cataloged that library. That was the thing Alice had not known and could not have guessed. The Duke told her about it standing at the window in about eleven minutes, in a voice that got steadier rather than worse as he went on.

"She began it in September of '16 because she said the shelves were a disgrace, which they were. Four thousand books and no order in them at all. My grandfather bought libraries by the yard, and my father never opened one." He had his hands behind his back.

"She did it in a quarto book. Author, title, edition, where it stood, and then a column of her own that she would not explain to me for about a year, which was what she thought of it. She got as far as 2,011 out of 4,000 and some. She was at it three years, and she stopped in November of '18 because she was carrying badly and could not stand at the shelves."

He turned around. "Then she died in January, and I put the quarto book in a drawer in this room, and I have not opened that drawer in eleven years, and I could take you to it now." Alice Verity sat in a chair in the library and did not say anything at all. The Duke looked toward the drawer and then back at her.