"That is not quite what I said."
"It is exactly what you said, and it is true," said Nicholas Ware. "And I have been sitting here for about a minute finding out that I have been extremely selfish for eight years, in a way that everybody has agreed to call bravery."
Hannah Sedge sat down opposite him. "Then plant the orchard," she said.
"Hannah—"
"Not for the apples. I do not care about the apples, and neither do you, and we are neither of us going to pretend otherwise at this hour of the afternoon." She leaned forward. "Plant it because there are about forty people in this house who have not been allowed to want anything for eight years, and because Mrs. Trant went red in a passage last week and had to sit down. And because a household that is waiting for a man to die is a very great deal worse to live in than a household where a man is dying. Those are different things, Nicholas. I have watched one of them for four years at my great-aunt's, and I know exactly what it does to a house."
He looked at her for a long moment. "I shall think about it," he said.
"That is not a no."
"It is not a no. It is a man of six-and-thirty who has had one idea for eight years being asked to have a different one on a Thursday afternoon, and I am going to want about a week."
He took four days. And on the fifth, he came into the small drawing room and put a paper on the table in front of her—an order to his agent about the lower orchard, nine pounds and some shillings, in his own hand—and said, "I have signed it, and I am not going to discuss it, and I want you to know that I have been extremely uncomfortable for four days, and that it has not been about the money."