"There is something very much amiss, and I want you to set it right for me. What was friendship invented for except to get a fellow out of scrapes?" "I have ever been your _âme damnée_, Lavendale," answered Herrick, betwixt jest and earnest. "It is the fashion to say that Lord Lavendale would have been a virtuous youth had not that scamp Durnford led him astray." "And yet I swear you were always the better of the two, and have oftener played Mentor than Mephistopheles. But now you have become a senator the town begins to respect you. You are no longer Lavendale's _alter ego_--the careless rake and spendthrift. You are a young man with a career, a great future before you. And now, Herrick, I want you to save me from my own selfish passion, my own reckless folly, and to save one who is well-nigh as reckless, and whom I love better than myself." "Lady Judith Topsparkle." "What, you know, then?" "I know nothing more than all the town knows--that at the rate you and Lady Judith are travelling you must both go to perdition sooner or later, unless you make a sudden pull-up. When one sees children picking flowers upon the edge of an abyss, one may easily guess the result." "And we are not children, and we knew the abyss was there. We have been wilfully blind, audacious, desperate. Herrick, we are pledged to be each other's ruin here and hereafter. Can a man of honour, do you think, recall such a pledge--break his word to the lady he has sworn to destroy?" "Perhaps from a modish point of view he would be a poltroon and a perjurer; but as a gentleman and a Christian he would do well to be forsworn." "I am to carry off Lady Judith this night, Herrick; coach and horses are ordered, relays bespoke all along the road, the lady's trunks are packed. I have raised five thousand, by way of a first instalment, upon this place. Everything is ready. Shall I not seem a base hound if I draw back?" "I know not what you will seem; but if you can save the lady's honour--" "She is spotless, Herrick. We have been near the abyss, not over it." "Save her, then, at any cost." "What, at the cost of rage and mortification to her? For I doubt she has set her heart upon destroying herself for my sake--would rather endure poverty and degradation with me than queen it as the wife of Topsparkle. But this must not be, Herrick. There is a reason, an unanswerable reason, why I should not spoil her life for a few short months of bliss." "There are a hundred reasons. Why speak so mysteriously of one?" "Because it is the strongest, and in some wise mysterious. I am doomed, Herrick. I have been warned that I had best prepare myself for the grave. I have but a short time to live." "What a foolish fancy! And from whom comes the mysterious warning? From your familiar, Vincenti?"