"You need a place to stay," said the Duke of Corvedale.
"I do."
"And I need a wife," he said.
There were two servants in that hall, and Hannah heard one of them move. She did not say anything at all. She stood on that step and looked at a man of six-and-thirty in a good coat who had gone slightly gray at the temples, and was—she noticed now—breathing rather carefully. And she waited, because there was nothing else to do, and because whatever this was, it was not going to be improved by her guessing at it.
"You are going to think I am mocking you," said Nicholas Ware.
"I have not decided what I think. Say the rest of it."
"Then come inside, because I am not going to do this on my own steps in front of Ralph."
He took her into the library, which was on the ground floor, and told her the whole of it in about nine minutes, standing up.
He said that he was six-and-thirty, and that his heart was failing and had been for eight years, and that a physician of great eminence had told him at eight-and-twenty that he would not see five-and-thirty, and that he had rather overstayed it. He said that if he died without a son, Corvedale went to a cousin's line in Northumberland whom he had met four times and had nothing against, and that this had been the one piece of his own business he had never been able to arrange. He said that he had refused every match his mother and his agent had put in front of him for eight years. And he gave the reason, which he had never given anybody: that he was not going to ask a girl of twenty to marry a dying man and then watch her be pleasant to him about it for three years.