“Your Royal Highness has just done so.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, my Lord Duke,” said Darcy, with a calm and unmoved look, “that your Royal Highness would never have recurred to the theme to one humbled as I am, if you had not forgiven it.”
“As freely as I trust you forgive me, Colonel Darcy,” said the Duke, grasping his hand and shaking it with warmth. “Now for my part: what can I do for you?—what do you wish?”
“I can scarcely ask your Royal Highness; I find that some kind friend has already applied on my behalf. I could not have presumed, old and useless as I am, to prefer a claim myself.”
“There's your own regiment vacant,” said the Duke, musing. “No, by Jove! I remember Lord Netherby asking me for it the other day for some relative of his own. Taylor, is the colonelcy of the Twenty-eighth promised?”
“Your Royal Highness signed it yesterday.”
“I feared as much. Who is it?—perhaps he'd exchange.”
“Colonel Maurice Darcy, your Royal Highness, unattached.”
“What! have I been doing good by stealth? Is this really so?”