In the morning, Abigail showed the boy the hold—one hand under the chest, one under the hindquarters, held in against you—and made him do it twice in the kitchen before she opened the door, and he did it right. The cat did not scratch him. She did not need to. She went stiff as a board and heavy as a stone and turned her yellow eyes on him, and Jacky, who was thirteen and not a fool, set her down on the step at once.They tried twice more, and got the same answer both times. The cat did not want a carrier. She wanted the one she had.She sat on the step a few minutes with her tail round her feet, looking down the lane at the forge, where the smoke was going up. Then she came in, because the step was cold and the kitchen was not, and got up on the window-seat, and went on looking at the lane out of the warm.She did that on the Thursday. She did it on the Friday, and a third herring went on a saucer in the pantry, and was not touched. She did it on the Saturday. A cat keeps yesterday's hours: at seven, for a fortnight, something had picked her up in that doorway and carried her to a warm coat, and so at seven she went to the doorway and waited for it, and it did not come; and she had never walked the lane by daylight in her life and did not start now. Abigail fed her and kept the range up. The price of it was a cat on a window-seat for three mornings, looking at a forge she would not walk to.The village was very quiet. Nobody went to the windows. The slate in the tap-room was not written on.The Duke of Walsingham went down the lane at seven each morning past the cat on the step without stopping, because he had been asked, and stood at the forge with nothing in his arms, and came back at noon past an empty step. And Abigail Tinsley, at the kitchen window with the cat sitting beside her on the seat, watched his face go by, and paid what it cost, which was that.On the Sunday, he left his coat at the forge.He had sat through church at the back, under the gallery, where a man of his size could be least looked at, and looked at the wall. Afterwards, in the going out, the parish stood about in the frost under the lych-gate—the roofed gate at the churchyard, where a coffin waits to be carried in—and looked across the road at the cat in the Fleece's window.And the Duke of Walsingham walked down the lane to the forge with the whole churchyard watching him, took off his green coat, folded it, and laid it on the end of the shoe-bench beside the blue one. Then he walked back up the lane to the Fleece in his shirtsleeves, in the frost, past the church, past the cat, and went in.