The Duke of Wintersea stood at the library window in the thin February sun and found that he was shaking.
"They cannot explain it," he said when Marguerite came to him. "They say I may have years—years after all this, after I had..." He stopped. "I do not know what to do with years, Marguerite. I had made myself ready to die. I had not made myself ready to live, and I find it is by far the harder thing."
She crossed the room to him.
The snow was beginning to melt on the sill outside. He could hear it dropping, a small, steady music after the silence of the deep winter, and beyond the glass the first hard green spears of the snowdrops had broken the frozen ground beneath the library window where his mother had planted them long ago.
"Then you will learn it," said Marguerite Ellery, the Duchess of Wintersea, "the way you learn anything: slowly and badly at first, and with someone beside you who will not let you give it up."
She looked up at him, and the steadiness in her face had something new beneath it now, something she had been keeping back as carefully as he had kept his fear.
"I did not marry you for your acres, sir, whatever I said in this room in January. I marked that the day you took my hand at the altar and I felt it tremble. I married a man who was so frightened and so alone that he could think of nothing to ask of the world but an heir, and I thought... I thought that if I could only make him eat his dinner and sit by his fire and tell the truth at 3:00 in the morning, he might remember that he was a man and not a problem to be settled.
I did not expect"—her own voice caught at last—"I did not expect to love you. It was not in the bargain, but there it is, and you may make of it what you will."
The Duke of Wintersea looked down at his wife in the strengthening light of the year's first true spring morning, and he understood that the thing he had sought when he stood cold before this hearth in January—the heir, the safe disposal of his estate, the tidy ending of himself—had been the wrong thing entirely; that he had asked the world for the one mean scrap he believed himself still entitled to, and the world, through this steady, gray-eyed woman who set her own terms, had given him instead the whole of itself back again.