“Well?”

“Well—­there’s a limit to what a man can expect even from his best friend.  I hope you won’t ask me to be Blanche’s messenger to-morrow.  I can’t, and won’t, go back to the inn as things are now.”

“You have had enough of it—­eh?”

“I have had enough of distressing Miss Silvester, and more than enough of deceiving Blanche.”

“What do you mean by ‘distressing Miss Silvester?’”

“She doesn’t take the same easy view that you and I do, Geoffrey, of my passing her off on the people of the inn as my wife.”

Geoffrey absently took up a paper-knife.  Still with his head down, he began shaving off the topmost layer of paper from the blotting-pad under his hand.  Still with his head down, he abruptly broke the silence in a whisper.

“I say!”

“Yes?”

“How did you manage to pass her off as your wife?”

“I told you how, as we were driving from the station here.”

“I was thinking of something else.  Tell me again.”

Arnold told him once more what had happened at the inn.  Geoffrey listened, without making any remark.  He balanced the paper-knife vacantly on one of his fingers.  He was strangely sluggish and strangely silent.

“All that is done and ended,” said Arnold shaking him by the shoulder.  “It rests with you now to get me out of the difficulty I’m placed in with Blanche.  Things must be settled with Miss Silvester to-day.”

“Things shall be settled.”

“Shall be?  What are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting to do what you told me.”

“What I told you?”

“Didn’t you tell me to consult Sir Patrick before I married her?”

“To be sure! so I did.”

“Well—­I am waiting for a chance with Sir Patrick.”

“And then?”

“And then—­” He looked at Arnold for the first time.  “Then,” he said, “you may consider it settled.”

“The marriage?”

He suddenly looked down again at the blotting-pad.  “Yes—­the marriage.”

Arnold offered his hand in congratulation.  Geoffrey never noticed it.  His eyes were off the blotting-pad again.  He was looking out of the window near him.

“Don’t I hear voices outside?” he asked.

“I believe our friends are in the garden,” said Arnold.  “Sir Patrick may be among them.  I’ll go and see.”

The instant his back was turned Geoffrey snatched up a sheet of note-paper.  “Before I forget it!” he said to himself.  He wrote the word “Memorandum” at the top of the page, and added these lines beneath it: 

“He asked for her by the name of his wife at the door.  He said, at dinner, before the landlady and the waiter, ’I take these rooms for my wife.’  He made her say he was her husband at the same time.  After that he stopped all night.  What do the lawyers call this in Scotland?—­(Query:  a marriage?)”