Lord Hartledon jerked his handkerchief out of his pocket, passed it over his face, and put it back again. "What fresh folly have you got into?--as I used to ask you at Oxford. You are in some mess." "I suppose it's of no use denying that I am in one. An awful mess, too." "Well, I have pulled you out of many a one in my time. Let me hear it." "There are some things one does not like to talk about, Carr. I sent for you in my perplexity; but I believe you can be of no use to me." "So you have said before now. But it generally turned out that I was of use to you, and cleared you from your nightmare." "All those were minor difficulties; this is different." "I cannot understand your 'not liking' to speak of things to me. Why don't you begin?" "Because I shall prove myself worse than a fool. You'll despise me to your heart's core. Carr, I think I shall go mad!" "Tell me the cause first, and go mad afterwards. Come, Val; I am your true friend." "I have made an offer of marriage to two women," said Hartledon, desperately plunging into the revelation. "Never was such a born idiot in the world as I have been. I can't marry both." "I imagine not," quietly replied Mr. Carr. "You knew I was engaged to Miss Ashton?" "Yes." "And I'm sure I loved her with all my"--he seemed to hesitate for a strong term--"might and main; and do still. But I have managed to get into mischief elsewhere." "Elster's folly, as usual. What sort of mischief?" "The worst sort, for there can be no slipping out of it. When that fever broke out at Doctor Ashton's--you heard us talking of it last night, Carr--I went to the Rectory just as usual. What did I care for fever?--it was not likely to attack me. But the countess-dowager found it out--" "Why do they stay here so long?" interrupted Thomas Carr. "They have been here ever since your brother died." "And before it. The old woman likes her quarters, and has no settled home. She makes a merit of stopping, and says I ought to feel under eternal obligation to her and Maude for sacrificing themselves to a solitary man and his household. But you should have heard the uproar she made upon discovering I had been to the Rectory. She had my room fumigated and my clothes burnt." "Foolish old creature!" "The best of it was, I pointed out by mistake the wrong coat, and the offending one is upstairs now. I shall show it her some day. She reproached me with holding her life and her daughter's dirt-cheap, and wormed a promise out of me not to visit the Rectory as long as fever was in it." "Which you gave?" "She wormed it out of me, I tell you. I don't know that I should have kept it, but Dr. Ashton put in his veto also; and between the two I was kept away. For many weeks afterwards I never saw or spoke to Anne. She did not come out at all, even to church; they were so anxious the fever should not spread." "Well? Go on, Val."