Lord Hartledon, to pacify her, left the room, and the countess-dowager rushed forth and bolted herself into her own apartments.

Was she mad, or making a display of affectation, or genuinely afraid? wondered Lord Hartledon aloud, as he went up to his chamber.  Hedges gave it as his opinion that she was really afraid, because she had been as bad as this when she first heard of the illness, before his lordship arrived.  Val retired to rest laughing:  it was a good joke to him.

But it was no joke to the countess-dowager, as he found to his cost when the morning came.  She got him out of his chamber betimes, and commenced a “fumigating” process.  The clothes he had worn she insisted should be burnt; pleading so piteously that he yielded in his good nature.

But there was to be a battle on another score.  She forbade him, in the most positive terms, to go again to the Rectory—­to approach within half-a-mile of it.  Lord Hartledon civilly told her he could not comply; he hinted that if her alarms were so great, she had better leave the place until all danger was over, and thereby nearly entailed on himself another war-dance.

News that came up that morning from the Rectory did not tend to assuage her fears.  The poor dairymaid had died in the night, and another servant, one of the men, was sickening.  Even Lord Hartledon looked grave:  and the countess-dowager wormed a half promise from him, in the softened feelings of the moment, that he would not visit the infected house.

Before an hour was over he came to her to retract it.  “I cannot be so unfeeling, so unneighbourly, as not to call,” he said.  “Even were my relations not what they are with Miss Ashton, I could not do it.  It’s of no use talking, ma’am; I am too restless to stay away.”

A little skirmish of words ensued.  Lady Kirton accused him of wishing to sacrifice them to his own selfish gratification.  Lord Hartledon felt uncomfortable at the accusation.  One of the best-hearted men living, he did nothing in his vacillation.  He would go in the evening, he said to himself, when they could not watch him from the house.

But she was clever at carrying out her own will, that countess-dowager; more than a match for the single-minded young man.  She wrote an urgent letter to Dr. Ashton, setting forth her own and her daughter’s danger if her nephew, as she styled him, was received at the Rectory; and she despatched it privately.

It brought forth a letter from Dr. Ashton to Lord Hartledon; a kind but peremptory mandate, forbidding him to show himself at the Rectory until the illness was over.  Dr. Ashton reminded his future son-in-law that it was not particularly on his own account he interposed this veto, but for the sake of the neighbourhood generally.  If they were to prevent the fever from spreading, it was absolutely necessary that no chance visitors should be running into the Rectory and out of it again, to carry possible infection to the parish.