It was a colored print, crude and very quick, of a long-legged duke in his night shirt pouring coffee into the cup of a serving girl in an apron. Underneath it said, "The Duke's coffee maid, and underneath that, served hot." Her aunt did not shout then either. She took the apron from Anna's hands at the kitchen door and hung it on its hook. She said that no respectable man would buy a cup of coffee from those hands now, and that the house could not afford to lose the men it had left.
She said Anna might keep to her attic until something could be arranged. She did not say what, and for the whole of that day, Anna sat on the narrow bed under the slope of the roof. The faded blue kirchief her nurse had tied round her neck on the ship lay folded on her knee. It was the only thing of her nurses she had kept. She listened to the voices of the merchants coming up through the boards, laughing.
The Duke of Rothley came at 4. Her aunt showed him up to the attic herself since there was nowhere else in the house to receive him and then stood outside the door which he closed. He had to bend his head under the beam. He looked at the narrow bed and the wash stand and the single row of hooks with her two gowns on them and he made no remark on any of it which she was grateful for. I have seen the print, he said.
I have done you a very great harm. I did not intend it, but that does not undo it. He stood very straight with his hat in his hand exactly as he had stood at the counter. There is only one remedy that the world will accept. I am asking you to marry me.
Anna had been sitting on the edge of the bed. She stood up. Your grace. You do not have to do this. I went of my own will.
Nobody forced me to that house. I know it. So does Stepan. And so does my household. And so do you.
The city does not care what any of us know. His voice was level and dry, like a man laying out a case he had already argued with himself all night. Consider it plainly. My name will cover yours. No man will print that picture again or laugh under your floor.
I am not a warm man and I will not pretend to be. I will not ask anything of you that you do not choose to give. You will have your own rooms and your own money and your freedom to go where you like. He paused. And Stepan needs you.