That was all Sir Digby had. But the captain on the grey had more, and it was about the Fleece, and about the innkeeper's daughter who walked a duke's coat down to a forge every morning of the week, and the field laughed again, because it was eleven o'clock on a frost and there was nothing else to do; and Abigail Tinsley was in the Fleece's doorway with a cloth in her hands, and heard it, and every head on the lane knew she had.The Duke of Walsingham stopped in the middle of the field with the cat in his arms. He did not laugh it off. He could not have; he did not have the sentences for laughing a thing off, and had never had them. He stood on the frozen lane with thirty horses round him and his face gone red to the hair, and he said to the captain, and to Sir Digby, and to the whole of the Kynaston country, in one piece, as loud as he had ever said anything:"I will carry the cat as long as the cat wants carrying. And Miss Tinsley need not be troubled by the field's wit. She has forty of you to feed by nine and she has done it."Then he walked on through them, the last thirty yards, with his ears burning, and set the cat on the bare shoe-bench, and took off the green coat and folded it beside her, and she stepped onto it and turned round once and sat; and he came back out to the gate and stood there with nothing in his arms, and did not look up the lane.It cost him what it cost. The joke went with the field that day, and to the Park that night. By the Wednesday, every dinner-table in the county had "Walsingham's cat" on it with the fish, and would have it there till the season ended in March. He heard it every night he dined at Brigstock. He did not laugh at it, and he did not answer it, and in the morning at seven he carried the cat.Sir Digby, at the cross, sat his bay a moment longer after the duke had gone down. Then he blew his horn, and the Kynaston hounds went away up the lane toward the Hall woods, and the field went after them; and Abigail Tinsley went back into her kitchen, and shut the door, and stood with her back against it.Mrs. Pilbeam, the vicar's wife, came to the Fleece's kitchen on the second Wednesday after the meet, in the afternoon, when the duke was at Brigstock, and she came kindly, which was the worst of it. She sat at the kitchen table in her bonnet and would not take tea. She said she had known Abigail's mother. And then she said what she had come to say, plainly, because she was a plain woman and believed it."An innkeeper's daughter walking a duke's coat down a lane every morning is a story, Abigail. It was a story before the field got hold of it and it is a worse one now. There's a book on you in your father's own tap-room. I have heard the odds. Rhoda Mabbott married her duke, and the whole county knows it, and that is exactly why the whole county is betting on you. One wedding at a forge does not make every duke's kindness a promise, my dear. He has promised you nothing. And when he goes home to Norfolk in March, the story stays here, with your name in it, and it will be in it when you are forty."She stood up.