‘Your secret is perfectly safe with me, Brownlow, rest assured. I give you my word I will never reveal it. You have behaved honourably and high-mindedly throughout. Your conduct commands my respect and admiration,--though I could wish some matters had turned out otherwise. But now as to this marriage--real or supposed--of poor Hartover’s and all the ugly plotting of which, I fear with you, he is the victim. I do not think I can find it in my conscience to stand by, or encourage you to stand by, with folded hands.’ ‘That is exactly what I was coming to, sir,’ I said, choking down alike my thanks and my emotion. ‘If, as you inform me, Lord Longmoor’s health is so precarious, the poor dear boy’s future must not be left to chance.’ ‘No, no,’ he answered warmly. ‘His foes, I fear, are very literally of his own household. If this woman is legally his wife, we, as his friends, are called upon to stand by the marriage and, on grounds of public policy, make the best of what, I admit, strikes me as a very bad business. If she is not legally his wife, if there is any flaw in the marriage, we must take means to establish the fact of that flaw and set him free. Whether he is grateful to us for our self-imposed labours affects our duty neither one way nor the other at this stage of the proceedings. But, should she prove the unscrupulous person I take her to be, he will very certainly thank us in the end. And now, Brownlow, it occurs to me the sooner we move in all this the better. There is no time to be lost.’ He gave me reasons for his opinion, in which I fully agreed; and we sat talking far into the night, with the result that within a fortnight I travelled, first to Yorkshire, and then up to town. CHAPTER XXXII. About my Yorkshire journey it is unnecessary to say much. I saw Hover once more, stately as ever, but lifeless. The great house shut up, its many treasures swathed in dust sheets and brown paper. When it would be opened again none knew. Probably Colonel Esdaile would bring some gentlemen down in August for grouse-shooting, or for covert-shooting in October. He would hunt there during the winter.--The Colonel, always and only the Colonel, as man in possession? I said as much to Warcop--to whom my visit was made--sitting before the empty stove in that queer sanctum of his, hung round with prints and spoils of the stud-farm and the chase. Whereupon he stuck out his bulldog under-jaw and mournfully shook his big grizzled head.