The corner of her mouth moved.
"I am told you have 4,000 books."
"4,000 and some," said the Duke. "I have read perhaps half. I had thought of late that I should not finish the rest. I had been making a list of the ones I most regretted leaving unread." He had not meant to say it; he never said such things aloud. But the snow and the small swaying dark of the carriage and the steadiness of her had loosened something in him, and he found he could not stop. "It is a foolish way to spend one's last winter, Miss Ellery, grieving over unread books."
"It is not foolish at all," she said quietly, "and you must call me Marguerite now, I think. We are married, and you have given me your mother's ring, and I do not believe she would have liked to hear you so formal with your own wife."
She looked down at the old gold band on her hand and then up at him, and there was no calculation anywhere in her face, only that level, steady kindness that had undone him in the library.
"Give me your list. We shall read them together, the regretted ones, by the fire. If you are to be dying, sir, you may at least die having finished your books, and with someone to argue with you about them. I have very decided opinions on a great many authors, and I warn you, I shall not spare you because you are unwell."
The Duke of Wintersea looked at his wife of three hours, who had just promised to spend his dying upon his unread books and her own sharp opinions, and felt somewhere beneath the cold weight he had carried since autumn the first faint stir of something he had thought gone out of him forever.
He did not know what to call it, but it had begun in that carriage in the snow, and he carried it into his house with him like a coal kept alive against the wind.
He had meant to keep his distance. He had built his whole proposal upon distance: the convenient marriage, the heir, the rich free widow walking away from his grave. But he had reckoned without the simple wearing fact of her company, and she had set it as her price, and so he could not avoid it.