Arnold started, and changed color. “There are difficulties in the way,” he said. “My good fellow! at every step of this business there are difficulties in the way. Sooner or later, your wife must know what has happened. The time for telling her is, no doubt, a matter for your decision, not mine. All I say is this. Consider whether the disclosure won’t come from you with a better grace, if you make it before you are fairly driven to the wall, and obliged to open your lips.” Arnold rose to his fee t--took a turn in the room--sat down again--and looked at Sir Patrick, with the expression of a thoroughly bewildered and thoroughly helpless man. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “It beats me altogether. The truth is, Sir Patrick, I was fairly forced, at Craig Fernie, into deceiving Blanche--in what might seem to her a very unfeeling, and a very unpardonable way.” “That sounds awkward! What do you mean?” “I’ll try and tell you. You remember when you went to the inn to see Miss Silvester? Well, being there privately at the time, of course I was obliged to keep out of your way.” “I see! And, when Blanche came afterward, you were obliged to hide from Blanche, exactly as you had hidden from me?” “Worse even than that! A day or two later, Blanche took me into her confidence. She spoke to me of her visit to the inn, as if I was a perfect stranger to the circumstances. She told me to my face, Sir Patrick, of the invisible man who had kept so strangely out of her way--without the faintest suspicion that I was the man. And I never opened my lips to set her right! I was obliged to be silent, or I must have betrayed Miss Silvester. What will Blanche think of me, if I tell her now? That’s the question!” Blanche’s name had barely passed her husband’s lips before Blanche herself verified Sir Patrick’s prediction, by reappearing at the open French window, with the superseded white hat in her hand. “Haven’t you done yet!” she exclaimed. “I am shocked, uncle, to interrupt you again--but these horrid hats of Arnold’s are beginning to weigh upon my mind. On reconsideration, I think the white hat with the low crown is the most becoming of the two. Change again, dear. Yes! the brown hat is hideous. There’s a beggar at the gate. Before I go quite distracted, I shall give him the brown hat, and have done with the difficulty in that manner. Am I very much in the way of business? I’m afraid I must appear restless? Indeed, I _am_ restless. I can’t imagine what is the matter with me this morning.” “I can tell you,” said Sir Patrick, in his gravest and dryest manner. “You are suffering, Blanche, from a malady which is exceedingly common among the young ladies of England. As a disease it is quite incurable--and the name of it is Nothing-to-Do.”