"Because I have been dying for eight years," said Nicholas Ware, "and I have entirely lost the habit of doing things in the right order."
Hannah Sedge stood there for a moment. "Third question," she said. "Is there anybody else—a woman, or an understanding, or somebody who is going to be hurt by this?"
"There is nobody, and there has not been for nine years. And I shall tell you why if you ask me, but I would rather do it sitting down, and not today."
"And the fourth." Hannah Sedge put her bag down on the floor, which was the first thing she had done in that room. "Do you want a child, or do you want an heir?"
Nicholas Ware did not answer that for about four seconds.
"That is the best question anybody has asked me in eight years," he said, "and I have been asked about a great many things by a great many careful men. An heir. That is the honest answer, and I am going to give it to you honestly, because you have asked me plainly, and because I do not think you are a woman who wants to be told a nicer thing. I have arranged my death for eight years, and this is the last piece of it. And I have been sitting in this house for two of them with the whole thing done except that one item, and it has been the only thing I could not do because it required somebody else to agree to it. I want the house not to go to Northumberland. That is what I want. And if I said to you that I wanted a child at six-and-thirty in this condition, knowing what I know, then I should be a liar, and you would find it out inside a year, and you would be perfectly entitled to hate me for it."
Hannah Sedge picked her bag back up. "Then I shall marry you," she said.
Nicholas Ware got up off the arm of that chair. "Miss Sedge, you have not asked me my reasons, and I am going to give them to you anyway, because you have been extremely honest with me for a quarter of an hour, and I am not going to be less so."
She stood very straight. "I have got four shillings. That is the first one, and it is the largest, and I am not going to pretend it is not. The second is that I have kept a house for nine years and been good at it, and had nothing whatever to show for it, and you have just offered me one for my life, and I have been on a road for three weeks finding out exactly what a woman with no money and no character is worth in this country. And the third is that you asked me a question on that step, and I said, 'I do not know,' and you did not look at me the way people look at a woman who does not know. That is all. It is a very small thing to marry somebody for, and I have not got a better one, and I would rather tell you the truth than invent something creditable."