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He questioned her whether the gentleman had signalled him to her on the hill.

‘What can he mean about a gentleman?’ she turned to Chloe. ‘My duke told me you would meet me, sir. And you are to protect me. And if anything happens, it is to be your fault.’

‘Entirely,’ said the beau. ‘I shall therefore maintain a vigilant guard.’

‘Except leaving me free. Oof! I’ve been boxed up so long. I declare, Chloe, I feel like a best dress out for a holiday, and a bit afraid of spoiling. I’m a real child, more than I was when my duke married me. I seemed to go in and grow up again, after I was raised to fortune. And nobody to tell of it! Fancy that! For you can’t talk to old gentlemen about what’s going on in your heart.’

‘How of young gentlemen?’ she was asked by the beau.

And she replied, ‘They find it out.’

‘Not if you do not assist them,’ said he.

Duchess Susan let her eyelids and her underlie half drop, as she looked at him with the simple shyness of one of nature’s thoughts in her head at peep on the pastures of the world. The melting blue eyes and the cherry lip made an exceedingly quickening picture. ‘Now, I wonder if that is true?’ she transferred her slyness to speech.

‘Beware the middle-aged!’ he exclaimed.

She appealed to Chloe. ‘And I’m sure they’re the nicest.’

Chloe agreed that they were.

The duchess measured Chloe and the beau together, with a mind swift in apprehending all that it hungered for.

She would have pursued the pleasing theme had she not been directed to gaze below upon the towers and roofs of the Wells, shining sleepily in a siesta of afternoon Summer sunlight.

With a spread of her silken robe, she touched the edifice of her hair, murmuring to Chloe, ‘I can’t abide that powder. You shall see me walk in a hoop. I can. I’ve done it to slow music till my duke clapped hands. I’m nothing sitting to what I am on my feet. That’s because I haven’t got fine language yet. I shall. It seems to come last. So, there ‘s the place. And whereabouts do all the great people meet and prommy–?’

‘They promenade where you see the trees, madam,’ said Chloe.

‘And where is it where the ladies sit and eat jam tarts with whipped cream on ’em, while the gentlemen stand and pay compliments?’

Chloe said it was at a shop near the pump room.

Duchess Susan looked out over the house-tops, beyond the dusty hedges.

‘Oh, and that powder!’ she cried. ‘I hate to be out of the fashion and a spectacle. But I do love my own hair, and I have such a lot, and I like the colour, and so does my duke. Only, don’t let me be fingered at. If once I begin to blush before people, my courage is gone; my singing inside me is choked; and I’ve a real lark going on in me all day long, rain or sunshine–hush, all about love and amusement.’

Chloe smiled, and Duchess Susan said, ‘Just like a bird, for I don’t know what it is.’

She looked for Chloe to say that she did.

At the moment a pair of mounted squires rode up, and the coach stopped, while Beau Beamish gave orders for the church bells to be set ringing, and the band to meet and precede his equipage at the head of the bath avenue: ‘in honour of the arrival of her Grace the Duchess of Dewlap.’

He delivered these words loudly to his men, and turned an effulgent gaze upon the duchess, so that for a minute she was fascinated and did not consult her hearing; but presently she fell into an uneasiness; the signs increased, she bit her lip, and after breathing short once or twice, ‘Was it meaning me, Mr. Beamish?’ she said.