"I do not know how to be a man who does not know," said Nicholas Ware. And it came out so flatly and so plainly that Hannah understood at once that this was the actual thing, and had been for four hours, and probably for nine weeks. "I have had a date since I was eight-and-twenty," he said. "It was a bad date, and I have hated it, and I have been frightened of it every night for years. And I have also, Hannah... I have used it every single day. It has told me what to do about everything. It told me not to plant an orchard. It told me not to open four rooms, and not to mend a sash cord, and not to make any friends, and not to marry any of the nine women my mother put in front of me. It told me what to do about my mother's last four years, and I got that wrong. And I have never once had to wonder whether I got it wrong, because the date told me I had no choice. And Ambrose Pell has sat in my library this afternoon and taken it away, and he has not given me another one. And I have been standing in this orchard for four minutes finding out that I have got no idea whatever how to decide anything."
Hannah Sedge stood in that cold orchard with her husband.
"No," she said. "You have not, and neither has anybody else, Nicholas. That is the part I do not think you have got yet, and I have been waiting all afternoon to say it. I have not got a date. Mrs. Trant has not got one. There is not one person in this county who knows how long they have got. And every single one of them has to decide about orchards anyway. And they do it badly, and they get it wrong, and they plant things they will not see. You have not been given a sentence this afternoon. You have been given what everybody else has got, and it is horrible, and it is the ordinary condition of being alive, and you have not had to do it since you were eight-and-twenty."
Nicholas Ware stood in the middle of nine young trees. "That is not comforting," he said.
"No," Hannah agreed. "It is not. I have thought about it for four hours, and I could not find a comforting way to put it, and I decided you would rather have it straight."
"I would." He was quiet for a moment. "Hannah, I want to ask you something, and I have got no right to it whatever. I married you in nine days because I was dying and needed an heir. And I said so on the doorstep and in the library, and I have never once pretended otherwise. And you married me because you had four shillings, and said so. And that bargain was made by a man who had seven years and had taken eight and a half. And this afternoon, it has stopped being that bargain, and I find I do not know what it is instead, and I am asking you what you want."
Hannah Sedge did not answer for about half a minute.
"I want to say two things," she said. "And the first one is the one I have been carrying since about November, and could not say while you had a date: I have been in love with you since the garden room. Not the night itself—about a week afterward, when I understood that you had said the truest thing anybody has ever said to me, and had then got up the next morning and asked me about the tithe on the marshland as though nothing had happened. And I could not say one word about it in November, because you were a man who thought he had eighteen months. And there is nothing crueler you can say to a man in that condition than that somebody has begun to want him to stay."
Nicholas Ware did not say anything at all.