Hannah Sedge looked at that list for a moment. "We shall not do all of it," she said.
"No, Your Grace. There is about four hundred pounds on that paper, and I am not a fool."
"Then choose four, and we shall begin with those in the spring. And you will choose them, and not me. And I want the long gallery on the list for next year, in your own hand, so that it does not get lost."
Mrs. Trant took her paper back. She got to the door, stopped, and said without turning around, "I have been in this house nineteen years, and that is the first list I have written in eight of them."
The marriage became a real one somewhere in the autumn, and neither of them ever settled which week. It was not a scene, and there was no conversation about it beforehand—which Hannah thought about a great deal afterward, and decided had been the only way it could possibly have happened between two people who had signed a bargain on a Thursday in a library.
What happened first was that they began to have dinner together. They had not for the first two months. He had eaten in the estate room at seven because he had done so for eight years, and because a man who cannot climb stairs quickly arranges his day around the ground floor; and Hannah had eaten in the small dining room at eight, and neither of them had remarked on it.
She changed it in the ninth week by the simple method of having her dinner brought to the estate room, sitting down, and saying nothing whatever about it.
He looked up. He looked at the second place. He said, "Ah." And went back to his letters.
And they ate in that room together every night for the next thirty years.