“Justice to her!” cried Edgar. “If she has been faithful for three years, do you think she is likely to change now? All that time not a word has passed between us; but you told me yourself she would not hear of--anything; that she spoke of retiring from the world. Would that be wiser or more prudent? Look here, nobody in the world has been so kind to me as you. I want you to understand me. A man may sacrifice his own happiness, but has he any right to sacrifice the woman he loves? It sounds vain, does it not?--but if she chooses to think this her happiness, am I to contradict her? I will do all that becomes a man,” cried Edgar, unconsciously adopting, in his excitement, the well-known words, “but do you mean to say it is a man’s duty to crush, and balk, and stand out against the woman he loves?” “You are getting excited,” said Mr. Tottenham. “Speak lower, for heaven’s sake! Earnshaw; don’t let poor Mary hear of it to-night.” There was something in the tone in which he said _poor_ Mary, with a profound comic pathos, as if his wife would be the chief sufferer, which almost overcame Edgar’s gravity. Poor Mr. Tottenham was weak with his own sufferings, and with the blessed sense that he had got over them for the moment. “What a help you were to me this afternoon,” he said, “though I daresay your mind was full of other things. Nothing would have settled into place, and we should have had a failure instead of a great success but for you. You think it was a great success? Everybody said so. And your poor lady, Earnshaw--your--friend--what of her? Is it as bad as you feared?” “It is as bad as it is possible to be,” said Edgar, suddenly sobered. “I must ask further indulgence from you, I fear, to see a very bad business to an end.” “You mean, a few days’ freedom? Yes, certainly; perhaps it might be as well in every way. And money--are you sure you have money? Perhaps it is just as well you did not come to the Square, though they were ready for you. Do you come with me to-night?” “I am at my old rooms,” said Edgar. “Now that the Entertainment is over, I shall not return till my business is done--or not then, if you think it best.” “Nothing of the sort!” cried his friend--“only till it is broken to poor Mary,” he added, once more lachrymose. “But, Earnshaw, poor fellow, I feel for you. You’ll let me know what Augusta says?” And Mr. Tottenham opened his door with his latch-key, and crept upstairs like a criminal. He was terrified for his wife, to whom he felt this bad news must be broken with all the precaution possible; and though he could not prevent his own thoughts from straying into a weak-minded sympathy with the lovers, he did not feel at all sure that she would share his sentiments. “Mary, at heart, is a dreadful little aristocrat,” he said to himself, as he lingered in his dressing-room to avoid her questions; not knowing that Lady Mary’s was the rash hand which had set this train of inflammables first alight.