'You can arrange to come home by the Medusa next week?' he asked, holding me away from him to look at me again. His eyes just danced. 'You can tear yourself away?'
'Yes,' I said, flinging away at one fell swoop all sorts of engagements for the six weeks to come. What does anything else matter when you've just made quite certain of a husband?
Then there really was the sound of wheels on the drive. We scrambled on to separate chairs, and I tried frantically to rearrange myself and look as if I hadn't just been proposed to. But of course Berengaria, being a woman, saw and guessed, and the moment we were alone together I told her all that there was to tell.
'Only to think,' she said, looking at me thoughtfully with a new sense of my importance as she sat in my room that night, 'only to think that you will be a Duchess without any trouble at all, whereas I,' she sighed comically with a little shrug, 'however much I prod John along, I can never hope in my wildest dreams to become anything more than a Lady.'
Ermyntrude received the news with no less wonder and delight.
'Your Grace will sound so much better than Miss, won't it, miss?' she said, growing quite animated. 'If only his Lordship doesn't go and die before his father. What a pity that would be. We must pray that he doesn't get attacked by any of the ninety-six diseases, miss—just as the little Shan chiefs at the Durbar said they prayed for the King.'
