"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 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." "And now?" She turned towards the house again, and as she walked back, said: "I don't quite know." And Bulstrode asked her: "That is why you are here, to find out?" "Partly." Her companion's face grew stern. The Duchess did not see it for her eyes had again swept the upper window. At her side Bulstrode went on: "You have taken ten years to discover that you did not love your husband. You have taken one year to begin to wonder, to doubt, to suspect, to half think that you do; it's an unstable state of heart, Duchess, terribly unstable." The woman stopped short at his side, and now as she lifted up her eyes and saw him, was a little startled if not frightened at his expression. "Unstable," she repeated, with a world of scorn in her voice. "How can you use that word to me, knowing the facts of the case?" "Oh, a man," said Bulstrode rather impatiently, "is a worthless, wretched piece of mechanism altogether. I grant you that--utterly unworthy the love and confidence of any good woman. He is capable of all the vagaries and infidelities possible. We'll judge him so. But," he continued, "these wandering, vagrant derelicts have been known to tie fast, to find port, to drop anchor. They have even brought great riches and important treasure into harbor, fetched a world of good luck home. There's only one thing in the universe that can keep a man, Duchess, only one." "Well?" she encouraged him.