"Because you do not examine a dying man, Hannah! Because there is nothing to be done, and there never was! And what would be the object of it? To have him tell me again? To sit in this room while another old man says the same thing more slowly, to find out whether it is true? It is true! I cannot get up a flight of stairs! I have been sitting in this chair since two in the morning!"
"That is not what I said." Hannah turned around at last. "I am not standing in this room at four in the morning telling you that you are well, and I want that clear, because it would be an idiotic thing to say, and I have watched you tonight, and I shall not forget it as long as I live. You are ill. Something is wrong with your heart, and it is not going to be mended by anybody, and I am not fool enough to think it is. What I am asking you is a different question, and it is the only one I have got: Ambrose Pell told you eight years ago exactly how long that thing would take to kill you. He said seven, and it has been eight and a half, and he has not looked at you once in the whole of that time. So either he was right about the thing and wrong about the time, or he was wrong about both, or he was right about everything and you have had a great deal of luck. And there is not one person in England who knows which of those it is, and there has not been for eight years, because nobody has troubled to go and find out."
Nicholas Ware sat in that chair and looked at his wife. "I have arranged my whole life around that man's sentence," he said.
"I know it. I have been living in the house you arranged since June."
"Everything. The orchard, and the west rooms, and the sash cord, and my mother's last four years, and every match I refused, and the reason I have got no friends, and the reason I married a woman off my own doorstep in nine days. All of it, Hannah. Every single decision I have made since I was eight-and-twenty has come out of about forty minutes in a library. And you are standing in my garden room at four in the morning suggesting to me that nobody has checked."
"Yes," said Hannah Sedge.
"Do you know what that would mean?"
"I have thought about very little else since September."
"Then say it, because I find that I cannot."