an...?" Jimmy emphasized.

"It was a confidence, wasn't it?"

"A real one," she was assured.

"Well then, you'll keep it, of course."

She drew the stole up round her long fair neck; her delicate head came
out of the soft fur like a flower. But before she could follow up her
words Bulstrode said:

"You, of course, then know how he loves you."

He felt more than knew that she trembled, and he saw an instinctive
gesture which he understood meant that he should be silent.

"You and I put it quite clearly, Mr. Bulstrode, the other day." Her
voice was serene again. "If only one cares enough--that's the
necessary thing for every question."

"Well?"

She half shrugged, made a little motion with her white hands, and this
answer said for her: "That is indeed the question, and I haven't solved
it."

They stopped at the terraced walk. The low stones, dark and black,
were filled in their interstices with fine lines of greenish moss. On
the sunny corner the dial's shadow fell across the noon. The Duchess
put her hand on the warmed stones.

"It's a heavenly day," she said, "I don't believe that the Riviera is
warmer. I never have seen such an English December."

Her eyes, which had been fixed on the woods below the garden, now
turned towards the house and rested on one of the upper windows where
the sun fell on the little panes. The Duchess remained looking up a
few seconds, then she came back to her guest.

"I started, you know, to tell you something," Bulstrode smiled at her.
"I once served on a jury in the West, and although the case was a
miserably sad one in every way, I suppose, I couldn't take it as
seriously as I should have done, for from the first the whole thing
seemed so unnecessary, and the crisis could so easily have been
avoided."

"I know," she interrupted him, "but you're rather wrong. Not from the
first."

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