And then he said the bargain:
"You would marry me. You would live in this house as its mistress, with everything that goes with it. If there is a child, then Corvedale does not go to Northumberland, and I shall have done the last thing I have got to do. And when I die—which I have been told will be soon for eight years, and which I have stopped predicting—you will have this house for your life, and an income settled on you separately that cannot be touched by anybody, whether there is a child or not. That is the whole of it, Miss Sedge. It is a transaction, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to insult you by dressing it up. And I want you to understand that I would have said exactly this to any capable woman who came up those steps this afternoon."
Hannah Sedge stood in that library. "That is not true," she said.
Nicholas Ware stopped. "I beg your pardon?"
"You would not have said it to any woman who came up those steps," said Hannah Sedge, "because about four women a month come up somebody's steps in this county wanting a place, and you have been dying for eight years and have not married one of them. So you have said it to me this afternoon for some reason, and I should like to know what it was, because I have got four shillings, and I am going to have to make a decision in about a quarter of an hour, and I would rather make it knowing."
Nicholas Ware sat down on the arm of a chair—which she understood four months later meant that he had run out of breath and would not say so.
"You said, 'I do not know,'" he said.
"Sir?"
"On the step. I asked you what you would do after two nights, and you said, 'I do not know.' In front of two of my servants, with four shillings in your pocket. Miss Sedge, I have had about nine people in this house in eight years who wanted something from me, and every single one of them had a plan and told me about it inside four minutes. And a woman came to my door this afternoon with everything she owns in a bag, and did not have one, and did not invent one. And I have been standing in that hall for a minute working out why that struck me so hard. It is because I have not told one person in eight years that I do not know what is going to happen to me. Not one. I have had a date, and a physician, and a set of arrangements. And I have gone about this county being extremely calm about the whole business, and I have not the smallest idea whether I shall be alive at Christmas, and I never have had."