She tied him to the living world a thread at a time, and the threads held.
The village felt it, too. Word went about, as word does, that the dying Duke of Wintersea had taken a bride who went among the tenants in the snow with broth and good sense, who had reopened the question of the school, who sat with her husband by the fire and made him laugh—for he had laughed once, sharp and surprised at something she said, and the footman who heard had carried the marvel down to the kitchens like news of a comet.
The house that had waited for a death began, very quietly, to keep itself differently, as a house does when there is a reason to.
And a strange thing began to happen, so slowly that he did not mark it at first.
He stopped dying.
He could not have said when it turned; there was no single morning. But somewhere in the deep of that long winter, the Duke of Wintersea, who had ordered his own grave and settled his own affairs and made his peace with the dark, began—against all the wisdom of his physicians and all the resolution of his own despairing heart—to want to live.
He noticed it one morning in February when he woke and found that his first thought was not of the end, but of the day: of a thing Marguerite had said the night before that he wished to answer, of the spring planting they had argued over, of the simple ordinary wish to see her face across the breakfast table.
He lay in the cold gray light and recognized the feeling with a kind of terror worse than any he had known, for it was hope, and hope in a dying man is the cruelest thing of all.
He sent for the physicians again. They came and prodded and conferred in the passage and emerged baffled. The decline had halted. The thing they had been so certain of had not, after all, run its course. They could not account for it. They used words like remission and respite, and they cautioned him against confidence, and they went away.