Nicholas Ware stood in his own library. "Then we understand each other," he said.
"Not yet," said Hannah Sedge. "But we have both told the truth twice in a quarter of an hour, which is a great deal more than most people manage. And I find I am willing to see what happens next."
They were married nine days later in the parish church with four people in it. And Hannah wore the green gown because it was the best she had, and because Nicholas had offered to have something made and she had said no. She gave her reason, and he never argued with it:
"If I am married in a gown you have paid for, in a church in front of your own tenants, then every soul in this county has the whole story inside a fortnight, and they have got it in the shape that suits them. And if I am married in the gown I walked here in, they have got a great deal less to work with."
"They will say it anyway."
"They will say it anyway," Hannah agreed, "and they will be about half right. And I would rather be half right in my own clothes."
The county said it inside about four days. She never heard the worst of it, and she knew there was worse. And what came back to her through Mrs. Trant, who told her in the second week because she had decided that somebody ought to, was roughly this: that a woman had come up to the door at Corvedale with a bag, and had been married in nine days, and that the Duke was dying, and that anybody could see what that was.
Hannah Sedge heard the whole of it standing in the stillroom and said, "Yes, that is more or less what happened, Mrs. Trant, and I am not going to be able to contradict any of it, and I should be obliged if you would go on telling me things."
Mrs. Trant, who was fifty and had been in that house nineteen years, and had come into the stillroom braced for tears or temper, stood there for a moment. "You are a very odd young woman," she said.