"Then you'd best say what did bring you here, sir, because I have a lamb to see settled and a fence that won't mend itself."
He had rehearsed something over those four days, some careful, dignified introduction. Looking at her kneeling in the mud with blood to her elbow, he understood in about two seconds that every word of it was useless. So he told her the truth instead, and it took him under two minutes:
"My name is Edmund Graves. I am the Earl of Ashcombe, and my land lies some thirty miles from here. My grandfather's will requires that I marry before my thirty-fifth birthday, or a portion of the estate passes to relations in Canada who have never seen it. And four hundred people on that land would wake up one morning with a landlord who has never once stood in their lane. I have eleven weeks. I have refused seven arranged marriages over ten years, and I am not going to explain why on a public road to a woman I've known for ninety seconds. I have spent four days looking for somebody nobody arranged for me. I am asking you to marry me."
Charlotte Ferris knelt there in the mud, with the lamb still steaming against the ewe's side, and she took her time—which he would think about for the rest of his life. She did not laugh. She did not rise to curtsy. And she did not ask him a single question about his fortune, which was the detail that undid him completely.
"Where," she said finally, "would I be going?"
"A house with more rooms than I could count for you honestly, and land in four directions, and four hundred people who work it."
Charlotte looked around at her own paddock slowly—at the sheep, the crooked fence, a cottage some way off with smoke rising from its chimney, and a boy of perhaps thirteen standing at the gate watching them both with open curiosity.