"You've come thirty miles and stood at a stone wall and told a woman covered in a ewe's blood the truth about a will and four hundred people, and you haven't once mentioned how fortunate I'd be to have you. Most men in your position would have led with that. I'm not going to refuse you in four minutes for it. But I have a condition, and it isn't a starting offer to be talked down from. I want you to hear it, and then go home and think on it properly for a week before you answer."
"Say it."
"Only if you live here first," said Charlotte Ferris.
There was a long silence on that lane.
"Here?" said Edmund.
"In that cottage. Here with me, and Danny, and Silas, and Mrs. Enfield, and lambing at four in the morning, and shearing in June. Not for a summer, and not as some grand gesture, but living here properly for a year before I ever set foot in your house.
"You want a wife who isn't impressed by a title? You've said so yourself, not ten minutes ago to a total stranger. Then don't ask me to move straight into the middle of that title, because the very first thing that happens to a woman surrounded by forty rooms is that she becomes impressed by them. Within a few years, I'd be exactly the sort of wife you've spent a decade avoiding. I'm not being clever with you. I've had about two minutes to think it through, and that's the truest thing I've come to."