He capitulated. "Well, grant it so if you like, only agree with me when I say from my own—" he put his hand down on the dial's edge. "From this lovely noon-time on, every hour you waste is clear loss. The Duke loves you as women are rarely loved, and after all," he said with something like passion in his agreeable voice "what do you all expect? Love doesn't hang on every tree for a woman to pluck at will, and you have the great luck, my dear Duchess, to be loved by your own husband. Why don't you go to him?"
"Go to him?" she echoed.
He curtly replied: "Why not?"
"My dear friend!"
"Why, didn't you forbid him to go to you?"
"Ah," she nodded, "the confidence, it was intimate indeed. But since you have got it, won't you agree that any man, if he loved a woman, would disobey her?"
"Westboro' would not."
The Duchess said coldly: "Pride is not love."
"You didn't mean him, then, to keep his vow?"
"Yes," she slowly thought out, "I did indeed, with all my heart."