The farrier was at the grey's near fore. She was a small, sharp woman in a leather apron with her sleeves rolled back and her hands black to the wrist, and she had the foot up on her knee and her thumbs in the heel of it, and she was reading it. That is what a farrier does before she shoes a horse: she reads the foot. The grey, who had torn three aprons, stood on three legs with his lower lip hanging and let her. She was the Duchess of Brigstock, and she had not said a word to anybody since seven o'clock, and she was not going to.On the stool at the fire's left hand, an old man with ruined hands in a pair of coachman's gauntlets watched the cat on the green coat. The cat was the only thing in Sedgebrook that sat on his knees. He said one thing a day, Jethro Mabbott, and the shop had learned to wait for it."Well," he said, "that's the Park's twenty gone."The Duke of Brigstock, whose Park kept the twenty horses that forge shod, laughed at the bellows and did not stop blowing.At the gate, the carrier had stopped his cob. The carrier went to Northampton on Fridays and to every village between, and he had seen the cat get down off one duke's coat and go and sit on another's, and he would carry it. He had carried the last one. Sedgebrook knew what that cat was.Fifteen months before, a duke had come down the lane on a lame horse and been told where to stand, and had stood there a fortnight, and the cat had sat on his coat every morning of it. In January, he had married the farrier. The cat had been on his coat since. And now she had got off it.The Duke of Walsingham did not know any of that. He knew that a cat was on his coat, and that he had been standing in a doorway for some minutes with his hat in his hands.The big chestnut in the only box the forge had, a horse called Bugler, put his head over the door, looked at the stranger, decided about him, and leaned. He leaned his whole head on the Duke of Walsingham's shoulder and shut his eyes."He does that," said Justinian. "He'll lean on anything that'll stand. Stand, Horatio."Horatio stood. He put one big hand up under the horse's jaw without thinking, the way he would have with any horse, and the horse sighed. And the Duke of Walsingham, who could not say good morning to a duchess, said to Bugler under his breath, in a voice nobody in the shop had heard him use: "There. There, old man. You've had a morning of it, I daresay." And he went on saying it, and the shop went on with its work.