Chapter 4: The Count Returns the Morning Call

The morning call was paid on a Tuesday.

Cecilia had expected it — social form required it, and whatever Count Vordescu was, he had demonstrated a command of social form that suggested long practice — but she had not expected it at eleven o'clock precisely, which was the first minute the convention permitted and therefore the minute at which only a man with nothing to conceal, or a man with everything to conceal and considerable experience in the management of it, would choose to arrive.

She was in the parlour when the carriage came up the drive. She had positioned herself in the chair nearest the window not because she was watching for him but because the light there was better for reading, and if the book she had selected was neither Tacitus nor the botanist's travel account but a perfectly ordinary volume of Cowper's poetry that she had finished in the summer, this was not remarkable and did not require explanation.