Nobody said anything for about two minutes.
"How long have you got?" said Hannah Sedge, and she felt his hand move under hers.
"I beg your pardon?"
"How long have you got?" she said again. "Nobody in this house has asked you that in eight years, and I have been here four months, and I have been working up to it since about September, and I have picked the worst possible hour of the worst possible night, and I am asking you anyway, because I do not think there is a good one."
Nicholas Ware sat in that chair in the dark. "I do not know," he said.
"Then who told you seven years?"
"Pell. Ambrose Pell of Bath. He examined me three times in the spring I was eight-and-twenty, and he sat me in my own library, and told me the heart was failing, and that I should put my affairs in order, and that I should not see five-and-thirty."
Hannah Sedge sat very still on that floor. "You are six-and-thirty," she said.
"I am aware of it."