"It was said in front of thirty people an hour ago, Aldous. It's not mine to keep any longer." He looked at Miss Penhallow. "It's not anyone's."
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The road from Chalcott to Wells climbed for three miles through hanging beech woods, and then ran along the shoulder of the Mendips with the whole of the Somerset levels laid out below on the left hand, green and silver and drowned in light, with Glastonbury Tor standing up out of the flats like the mast of a ship that had gone down there. Jasper did not see any of it. He drove the cob and the mare as hard as they would go, which was not hard, and every time the mare broke into a canter and the cob refused to follow, the little gig slewed and bucked on the ruts and Miss Penhallow put out her hand and gripped the rail and said nothing.
After the first mile he said, without looking at her, "Tell me about her."
"What do you want to know?"
"Anything. Everything." He swallowed. "Is she well? Does she — is she ill-used? Does she want for anything?"
"She has a two-room school in the Liberty, over a chandler's, with eleven pupils at six guineas a year, and she does fine needlework for half the brides in Wells. She keeps one maid and an under-teacher called Peverell who is seventeen and frightened of everything except arithmetic. She has a cat. She reads Italian at night when she thinks no one can hear her. She plays the old pianoforte in the schoolroom very badly and laughs at herself when she does it." Miss Penhallow paused. "She is not ill-used. She was. But she has been nobody's for five years, and I think it has suited her better than being anybody's ever did."
He drove on for a while.
"What did she say about me?"
Miss Penhallow did not answer at once. He glanced at her and saw that she was considering — not whether to tell him, he thought, but how much.
"She said she wrote to you from Carlisle. After he left her."
The road dipped and rose. He kept his eyes on the cob's ears.