"Of course it is. She must account somehow for having a girl turned off, and 'she gave up her stool to an old woman' does not answer." The Dowager Duchess buttered her toast. "It is being said in three parishes, Redmond. She offered me her resignation this morning."
"She what?"
"She said that a woman with a doubt on her name should not sit in my drawing room while my birthday guests are eating my supper, and that she would go to her aunt and take in plain sewing." She looked up. "I refused. She is a great deal more stubborn than I am, so you had better do something clever, and do it in front of witnesses, or I shall lose her."
The birthday assembly at Dunmore was held on the fourth of February, and the whole county came. Lady Sowerby came in bottle green with her daughter beside her in white. Constance stood by the Dowager's chair in a plain gray silk with the fit of her aunt's mending, and she did not once look at the door.
It happened, as such things do, at the worst possible moment, between the music and the supper, when the room was full and quiet enough to hear a fan close.
"Duchess, forgive me." Lady Sowerby's voice carried as it was meant to. "I must speak in your own house out of pure regard for you. That young woman by your chair was put out of a shop in Winbury for theft. I was present. I saw it done."
Sixty people turned round.
Redmond stepped away from the mantel.
"You were present," he said. "So was I."
He had never in his life used his full voice in a drawing room, and it stopped the movement of the room the way a hand stops a clock.
"Mr. Vell of Winbury is here this evening," he went on. "I invited him, and he was good enough to come. Mr. Vell, tell the room what Miss Redfern was dismissed for."
The draper came forward, twisting his hat, scarlet to the collar, and did the bravest thing of his small, careful life.
"For giving up her stool, Your Grace," he said. "And for asking to serve an old lady in black before Her Ladyship. There was never a farthing missing from my shop in the fourteen months she was in it, and I have said so to any who asked, and I am ashamed I did not say it louder."
The silence that followed had a particular quality that Redmond intended to remember for a long time.
"And the old lady in black," he said, "was my mother."
The Dowager Duchess of Dunmore rose from her chair, which took her a moment because her knees were bad and she declined all assistance on principle.
"I was counting my pennies out of a rag," she said pleasantly. "Lady Sowerby was so obliging as to remark upon it. This child," and she put her hand on Constance's arm, "did not know me from Eve and cost herself her bread for me. She did it while she was frightened, which is the only kind of courage that counts for anything. She has been my eyes since November. She will be at my side while I have one."
She looked round the room once.
"Now, supper."
Lady Sowerby left before the covers were off. Her carriage was a long time coming, and nobody assisted her to it.
Constance was on the terrace in the cold with her arms folded, which was where Redmond found her.
"I have made you a spectacle," he said.
"You have given me back my name." Her voice was not steady. "Which is a different thing, and I shall be grateful for it as long as I live. I would rather not be thanked for anything else, because there is not anything else."
"There is a great deal else."
She turned round then and looked at him, and her chin came up in the way it had come up across a draper's counter in the rain.
"Your Grace, I earn forty pounds a year and my aunt lives in your gatehouse. Whatever you are about to say, please consider what it will cost me to hear it."
"I have considered it since October," said Redmond. "That is why I have not said it before."
He came a step nearer and no more, and he did not touch her, though he wanted to more than he had ever wanted anything.
"You did not know she was a duchess," he said. "That is the whole of my case. There is not another woman in that room tonight who would have crossed a counter for a poor old woman in wet bombazine. I have spent my life among people who are unfailingly kind to me because of what I am, and I did not know until the fourth of February that I had never once been shown a kindness in my life. I saw you shown to be honest tonight. I have known you were good since the day it cost you everything."
He drew breath.
"Marry me. Not out of gratitude, and not tomorrow. Tell me to wait a year, and I will wait a year."
Constance Redfern put her hand over her mouth. Then she put it out to him instead, and he took it. Neither of them said anything at all for a moment while the light from the long windows lay in gold bars across the frost.
"You will be talked of," she said at last, shakily.
"I have an excellent mother. She will out-talk them."
They were married at Dunmore in the summer. The aunt with the bad chest was carried to the church in the Duke's own carriage and lived nine more years in the gatehouse.
Mr. Vell of Winbury supplied the linen and would take nothing for it, and had to be argued into a fair price by the new duchess, who knew the wholesale figure to a halfpenny.
And on Thursdays, for as long as the old lady lived, the Dowager Duchess of Dunmore still went into Winbury alone in her worst black bonnet to find out what the world was like. She said she had done rather well out of it once already.