“I imagine not,” quietly replied Mr. Carr.

“You knew I was engaged to Miss Ashton?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m sure I loved her with all my”—­he seemed to hesitate for a strong term—­“might and main; and do still.  But I have managed to get into mischief elsewhere.”

“Elster’s folly, as usual.  What sort of mischief?”

“The worst sort, for there can be no slipping out of it.  When that fever broke out at Doctor Ashton’s—­you heard us talking of it last night, Carr—­I went to the Rectory just as usual.  What did I care for fever?—­it was not likely to attack me.  But the countess-dowager found it out—­”

“Why do they stay here so long?” interrupted Thomas Carr.  “They have been here ever since your brother died.”

“And before it.  The old woman likes her quarters, and has no settled home.  She makes a merit of stopping, and says I ought to feel under eternal obligation to her and Maude for sacrificing themselves to a solitary man and his household.  But you should have heard the uproar she made upon discovering I had been to the Rectory.  She had my room fumigated and my clothes burnt.”

“Foolish old creature!”

“The best of it was, I pointed out by mistake the wrong coat, and the offending one is upstairs now.  I shall show it her some day.  She reproached me with holding her life and her daughter’s dirt-cheap, and wormed a promise out of me not to visit the Rectory as long as fever was in it.”

“Which you gave?”

“She wormed it out of me, I tell you.  I don’t know that I should have kept it, but Dr. Ashton put in his veto also; and between the two I was kept away.  For many weeks afterwards I never saw or spoke to Anne.  She did not come out at all, even to church; they were so anxious the fever should not spread.”

“Well?  Go on, Val.”

“Well:  how does that proverb run, about idleness being the root of all evil?  During those weeks I was an idle man, wretchedly bored; and I fell into a flirtation with Maude.  She began it, Carr, on my solemn word of honour—­though it’s a shame to tell these tales of a woman; and I joined in from sheer weariness, to kill time.  But you know how one gets led on in such things—­or I do, if you, you cautious fellow, don’t—­and we both went in pretty deep.”

“Elster’s folly again!  How deep?”

“As deep as I well could, short of committing myself to a proposal.  You see the ill-luck of it was, those two and I being alone in the house.  I may as well say Maude and I alone; for the old woman kept her room very much; she had a cold, she said, and was afraid of the fever.”

“Tush!” cried Thomas Carr angrily.  “And you made love to the young lady?”

“As fast as I could make it.  What a fool I was!  But I protest I only did it in amusement; I never thought of her supplanting Anne Ashton.  Now, Carr, you are looking as you used to look at Oxford; get your brow smooth again.  You just shut up yourself for weeks with a fascinating girl, and see if you wouldn’t find yourself in some horrible entanglement, proof against such as you think you are.”