Then, in the full sight of half of Somerset, she put her arms round his neck, and he held her.
---
The school lost three pupils that autumn, whose mothers did not care to have their daughters taught by a woman who had been in the newspapers. It gained seven, whose mothers cared very much — including the Bishop's wife's niece, who was nine and squinted and played the pianoforte worse than anyone Morwenna had ever heard, and was enrolled, the Bishop's wife said firmly, *because I should like her to learn from a woman who can stand up.*
On the eleventh of September, Morwenna Penhallow turned twenty-five, and her grandmother's nine thousand pounds became her own. She went to Bristol the same week with Mr. Gower, the attorney, and sat for three days in a stuffy room in Corn Street with the Crown's agent for forfeited estates, and at the end of the three days her uncle's notes had been compounded for at eleven shillings in the pound and the lease of the tall house in Queen Square had been made over to her aunt Clemency for life. It cost her a little over four thousand pounds. She did not ask anybody's advice about it. When she came back to Wells she told Jasper what she had done, flatly, as a matter of fact, and he said only, "Good," and she looked at him for a moment as though he had passed some examination she had not told him about.
He came on the Sunday after, as usual. Imogen was at evensong with the girls. Miss Peverell had been sent, with what Jasper later suspected was some ceremony, to the chandler's. Morwenna was alone in the schoolroom with the windows open and the cat on the pianoforte, adding up the quarter's accounts.
He stood in the doorway for a while before she noticed him.
"Your Grace," she said, looking up, and put down her pen. "Imogen isn't—"
"I know. I asked her to go." He came in and stood by the master's table, across it from her. He found that he did not know what to do with his hands. "Miss Penhallow. I have one question."
She looked at him for a long moment. Something moved at the corners of her mouth.
"Ask it, then," she said. "I'll answer it. And then you may go, if you're answered."
"Will you marry me?"
The cat yawned. Outside, the cathedral bells began.