“What’s this I hear, Johnnie? Sarah tells me you have revoked that woman’s notice.”
“Woman!” temporized his Grace. “What woman?” The tone was velvet.
She glowered at him.
“There’s only one woman in this household, my friend.”
The Duke laid down his Times with an air of extremely well assumed indifference. Were the parish pump and the minor domesticities all she could find to interest her, while all sorts of Radical infamies played Old Harry with the British Constitution?
Lady Wargrave, however, was well inured to this familiar gambit.
“Come, Johnnie,” she said tartly, “don’t waste time. The matter’s too serious. Sarah says you have asked Mrs. Sanderson to stay on.”
“Yes, I have asked her to be good enough to reconsider her decision,” said his Grace in the slightly forensic manner of the gilded chamber.
“On what grounds, may one ask?”
“I merely put it to her”—he now began to choose each word with a precision that made his sister writhe—“that she was indispensable to the general comfort and well-being of a man as old and gout-ridden as myself.”