“I!”

“Don’t make difficulties!  If you can’t find your way to Craig Fernie, I can help you.  As for Anne, you know what a charming person she is, and you know she will receive you perfectly, for my sake.  I must and will have some news of her.  I can’t break the laws of the household a second time.  Sir Patrick sympathizes, but he won’t stir.  Lady Lundie is a bitter enemy.  The servants are threatened with the loss of their places if any one of them goes near Anne.  There is nobody but you.  And to Anne you go to-morrow, if I don’t see her or hear from her to-day!”

This to the man who had passed as Anne’s husband at the inn, and who had been forced into the most intimate knowledge of Anne’s miserable secret!  Arnold rose to put Milton away, with the composure of sheer despair.  Any other secret he might, in the last resort, have confided to the discretion of a third person.  But a woman’s secret—­with a woman’s reputation depending on his keeping it—­was not to be confided to any body, under any stress of circumstances whatever.  “If Geoffrey doesn’t get me out of this,,” he thought, “I shall have no choice but to leave Windygates to-morrow.”

As he replaced the book on the shelf, Lady Lundie entered the library from the garden.

“What are you doing here?” she said to her step-daughter.

“Improving my mind,” replied Blanche.  “Mr. Brinkworth and I have been reading Milton.”

“Can you condescend so far, after reading Milton all the morning, as to help me with the invitations for the dinner next week?”

“If you can condescend, Lady Lundie, after feeding the poultry all the morning, I must be humility itself after only reading Milton!”

With that little interchange of the acid amenities of feminine intercourse, step-mother and step-daughter withdrew to a writing-table, to put the virtue of hospitality in practice together.

Arnold joined his friend at the other end of the library.

Geoffrey was sitting with his elbows on the desk, and his clenched fists dug into his cheeks.  Great drops of perspiration stood on his forehead, and the fragments of a torn letter lay scattered all round him.  He exhibited symptoms of nervous sensibility for the first time in his life—­he started when Arnold spoke to him.

“What’s the matter, Geoffrey?”

“A letter to answer.  And I don’t know how.”

“From Miss Silvester?” asked Arnold, dropping his voice so as to prevent the ladies at the other end of the room from hearing him.

“No,” answered Geoffrey, in a lower voice still.

“Have you heard what Blanche has been saying to me about Miss Silvester?”

“Some of it.”

“Did you hear Blanche say that she meant to send me to Craig Fernie to-morrow, if she failed to get news from Miss Silvester to-day?”

“No.”

“Then you know it now.  That is what Blanche has just said to me.”