"You see," he put it to her delicacy to understand, "it's scarcely, in a way, fair to him—I feel it so at least. It gives me the sensation of knowing more than he does in his own house about that which presumably should be Westboro's secret."
"You mean to say,"—the Duchess pinned him down, "that you'll give me away because of one of those peculiar crises of honor that makes a person betray a trust in order to salve his conscience?"
Bulstrode had come again faithfully, making the pilgrimage to the forest road, and he was not surprised that it should have finally turned out so that one day the gate yielded to his touch, and he found the Duchess if not waiting for him, distinctly there. During their delightful little talks—and they had been so—not once had the name of Bulstrode's host been mentioned; and if the lady had a curiosity concerning her lord and once master, she did not display it to the visitor.
"I mean to say," Bulstrode replied in answer to her challenge which was fiery, "that I really don't want to play false to Westboro', more false than I shall in the course of events be forced to be. Of course, your secret—I need not say so—is entirely safe. But the Duke comes back in a day or two, and rather than face him with this silence which you have imposed upon me I am going back to London before he returns."
The sewing she had chosen to finger—a Duchess, and an American one at that, is not expected to do more—lay at her feet. By her side was a basket of considerable proportions, and it was full to the brim with linen: the very fine white stuff overflowed from the basket like snow. The Duchess of Westboro's handiwork had already caught the eye of her guest. And now, as her long hands and her long finger, tipped by its golden thimble, handled her sewing, Bulstrode watched her interestedly and found great loveliness in her bending face.
"I didn't think any of you knew how to sew," he mused aloud.
"Any of us!" she smiled. "Do you, by that, mean American Duchesses? Or do you mean women who have left their husbands? Or in just what class do you think of me, regarding your last remark?"
She folded up her work and dropped her thimble in the nest of snow. Bulstrode acknowledged that his conclusion, whatever it had been, was wrong.
"When I married," the Duchess said, "I was the best four-in-hand whip for a woman in my set. I don't think I am a keen needlewoman, really, and I know then I didn't recognize a needle by sight. When my little boys were born I sent to Paris for everything they wore, and I can remember that I didn't even know for what the little clothes were intended, many of them, when they came home in my first son's layette. I have learned to sew since I came here to The Dials. I've been three months here, now, and I really must have proved a clever pupil, for I assure you that they tell me I have made some pretty things." As she spoke she held up the seam she ran, and Bulstrode, who himself confessed to not knowing a needle by sight, was forced to peer over the seam and endeavor to find her tiny stitches. He exclaimed:
"Three months! You must have been terribly dull!"