"Yes," said the Duke of Walsingham.The Kynaston hounds met at Sedgebrook cross on the Monday, which was Candlemas, and the frost had held, and the whole field was there by eleven, with Lady Kynaston in the carriage with the hood down, in dark green. Tuddenham the wheelwright, a year married that day, stood at his own door across from the forge with his wife on his arm to watch; because everybody in Sedgebrook knew by then what the coat on the bench meant, except the cat.The cat had come out to the Fleece's step for her few minutes and stayed, because there was sun on it, and sat looking at the forge. She had asked for the walk back and he had said yes; but a meet morning has forty breakfasts in it before nine, and he waited, as he had been asked to wait once before.At a quarter past eleven, the kitchen was clear, and the Duke of Walsingham came out of the Fleece's door in his shirtsleeves. He had no coat. It was on the shoe-bench, where the village had watched him put it. He came out into the frost with the cold going straight through his shirt, and thirty horses turned their heads, and he bent down on the step and picked up the catโone hand under the chest, one under the hindquarters, the whole of her in against himโand stood up, and walked down through the Kynaston field for the second time in his life with a stone of cat in his arms.Nobody laughed. Not the captain, who was there. Not anybody.Lady Kynaston, in the carriage, watched him go by with a pause exactly measured, and then looked at the cat, and then at the Fleece's door, and inclined her head one inch to nobody.He went in at the forge gate, and minded the cobbles by the trough, and went in at the shop door, and set the cat down on the green coat on the end of the bench, by the fire, where it had lain since Sunday and was as warm as a hearthstone. The cat turned round once, and sat, and shut her eyes.Then he turned round to the door. And Abigail Tinsley was in it.She had come. She had asked for this on a Sunday night at her own range, with a cat asleep on a bare chair behind her, and she had meant it then; and she was frightened of it now, with thirty horses in the lane and her name in the mouth of every one of them since the meet a fortnight since. She came anyway. She pulled the red shawl over her head and left the field's breakfast things where they stood, and walked the forty yards behind him with the field on both sides of her. And she stood in the forge doorway with the white lane behind her and the gold of the fire in front, and the shawl slipping, and did not come in.