“We did,” Hannah said with a sigh. She spread one hand on her lap and regarded the rings she wore on three of her well-manicured fingers. She smoothed her hand over the fine white muslin of her dress. “I do miss him. I keep thinking of all sorts of absurdities I simply must rush home to share with him, only to remember that he is not here any longer waiting to hear them.”

“But I know,” Barbara said, her voice earnest in its sympathy, “that he suffered dreadfully with his gout and that his heart was giving him much pain and trouble in his last years. I daresay it was a blessing that he went quickly in the end.”

Hannah felt inappropriately amused. Barbara would make an excellent vicar’s wife if her head was full of platitudes like that one.

“We should all be so fortunate when the time comes,” she said. “But I daresay his heart seizure was helped along by a too hearty indulgence in beefsteak and claret the night before he died. He had been warned off such extravagances ten years or more before I even met him and every year after that-oh, at least once a year. He was forever saying that his headstone ought to have been already gathering moss in the graveyard when I was rocking my dolls to sleep in the nursery. He used to apologize to me once in a while for living so long.”

“Oh, Hannah,” Barbara said, half distressed, half reproachful. And clearly unable to think of anything else to say in response.

“I finally put a stop to it,” Hannah said, “when I composed a very bad ode entitled ‘To the Duke Who Ought to Have Died’ and read it aloud to him. He laughed so hard that he brought on a coughing fit and very nearly did die. I would have written a companion piece, ‘To the Duchess Who Should Be a Widow,’ but I could think of nothing to rhyme with widow, except perhaps his toe, referring to his gout. But it seemed rather lame.”