A young woman had stopped at the gate beside the carrier's cob with a milk-can in each hand. She was in a brown wool gown with a red shawl crossed over it, and she was looking past the grey and the duchess and the duke to the end of the bench, and laughing."You've changed sides, have you?" she said to the cat.The cat did not open her eyes. The Duke of Walsingham, with a horse's head on his shoulder, looked at the young woman at the gate, and she looked at him, because it was his coat; and he looked away first, at the horse, and said to the horse, "Good morning." And she picked up her cans and went on up the lane to the inn, still laughing.Rhoda Mabbott set the grey's foot down and took up the off fore, and the grey gave it. Justinian took the day-book down off the shelf by the door and wrote under a plough-share: Hailstone, Walsingham's grey, four, and shut it. The rain had got in over the coal-house in the week and was dripping from the roof onto the coal, and nobody had time for it, and the cat sat on the green coat by the fire with her eyes shut, as though she had signed something.She had not. She had sat on the warmer of two coats. The blue one had come three miles in the frost from Brigstock Park on a duke's back and was cold through. The green one had hung all night by a kitchen fire at the inn by the cross, forty yards up the lane, and had come to the forge warm, and smelled of bacon, and was the thickest wool on the bench. That is the whole of what a cat knows.The village knew a good deal more, and by Friday so did Northampton.The inn by Sedgebrook cross was the Fleece, and its kitchen was Abigail Tinsley's, and the Duke of Walsingham was in it because the tap-room had thirty men in it and he could not. He had a bed at the Fleece because the Park was full of Justinian's hunting guests, and because when Justinian offered to turn two of them out, he had said no, and meant it.He had asked. He had come to the kitchen door at eight with his hat in his hands and asked the innkeeper's daughter whether a man might sit by the fire, if he was no trouble, and she had said the kitchen was not the place for a duke, and he had said he knew that, and stood there; and she had given him the potboy's stool. It was too small for him. Everything was.He sat on it by the range with his knees up and a cup of tea in a hand that made it look like a thimble, and the range smoked, because the back of it was cracked and had been since her mother's time, and he did not remark on it, and she did not apologize for it, and that was the first hour.It should be said what the Duke of Walsingham wanted. He had been the tallest man in every room since he was nineteen, and the richest since he was twenty-two, when his father died, and the quietest since he could remember. People spoke to him, because of the title, and then stopped, because of the silence, and went and spoke to somebody else, and he watched them go and could not think how to fetch them back. He had never once in his life been asked to stay anywhere. He had been invited everywhere. It is not the same.