'Where have you been all this time?' asked the Colonel, who was strolling on the broad gravel drive in front of the house, soothing his nerves with a cheroot, after the agitations of the last hour. 'You are to have your old room, I believe; I heard it was being got ready.' 'You are very kind. I walked half way to the Abbey with my cousin. We had a smoke and a talk.' 'I should be glad of a little more talk with you. This business of to-night is not at all pleasant, you know, Brian. It does not redound to anybody's credit.' 'I never supposed that it did; but it is not my fault that there should be this fuss. If my wife had been true to me all would have gone well.' 'I don't think you had a right to expect things to go well, when you had so cruelly deceived her. It was a base thing to do, Brian.' 'You ought not to say so much as that, sir, knowing so little of the circumstances. I did not deliberately deceive her.' 'That's skittles,' said the Colonel, flinging away the end of his cigar. 'It is the truth. The business began in sport. Bessie asked me to pretend to be my cousin, just for fun, to see if Ida would fall in love with me. Ida had a romantic idea about my cousin, it appears, that he was an altogether perfect being, and so on. Well, I was introduced to her as Brian of the Abbey, and though she may have been a little disappointed--no doubt she was--she accepted me as the perfect being. As for me--well, sir, you know what she is--how lovely, how winning. I was a gone coon from that moment. We kept up the fun--Bess, and the boys, and I--all that evening. I talked of the Abbey as if it were my property, swaggered a good deal, and so on. Then Bess, knowing that I often stayed up the river for weeks on end, asked me to go and see Ida, to make sure that old Pew was not ill-using her, that she was not going into a decline, and all that kind of thing. So I went, saw Ida, always in the company of the German teacher, and took no pains to conceal my affection for her. But I said not another word about the Abbey. I never swaggered or put on the airs of a rich man; I only told her that I loved her, and that I hoped our lives would be spent together. I did not even suggest our marriage as a fact in the near future. I knew I was in no position to maintain a wife.' 'You should have told her that plainly. As a man of honour you were bound to undeceive her.' 'I meant to do it, but I wanted her to be very fond of me first. Then came the row; old Pew expelled her because she had been carrying on a clandestine flirtation with a young man. Her character was compromised, and as a man of honour I had no course but to propose immediate marriage.'