“I am afraid you have been ill,” with rigid civility.

“A man feels rather an outsider in confessing he has let his horse throw him into a hedge.  It was my own fault entirely.  I allowed myself to forget that I was riding a dangerously nervous brute.  I was thinking of a painful and absorbing subject.  I was badly bruised and scratched, but that was all.”

“What did your doctor say?”

“That I was in luck not to have broken my neck.”

“You had better have a glass of wine,” touching a bell.  “You do not look equal to any exertion.”

In gathering himself together, Sir Nigel felt he was forced to use enormous effort.  It had cost him a gruesome physical struggle to endure the drive over to Broadmorlands, though it was only a few miles from Medham.  There had been something unnatural in the exertion necessary to sit upright and keep his mind decently clear.  That was the worst of it.  The fever and raging hours of the past days and nights had so shaken him that he had become exhausted, and his brain was not alert.  He was not thinking rapidly, and several times he had lost sight of a point it was important to remember.  He grew hot and cold and knew his hands and voice shook, as he answered.  But, perhaps—­he felt desperately—­signs of emotion were not bad.

“I am not quite equal to exertion,” he began slowly.  “But a man cannot lie on his bed while some things are undone—­a man cannot.”

As the old Duke sat upright, the blue eyes under his bent brows were startled, as well as curious.  Was the man going out of his mind about something?  He looked rather like it, with the dampness starting out on his haggard face, and the ugly look suddenly stamped there.  The fact was that the insensate fury which had possessed and torn Anstruthers as he had writhed in his inn bedroom had sprung upon him again in full force, and his weakness could not control it, though it would have been wiser to hold it in check.  He also felt frightfully ill, which filled him with despair, and, through this fact, he lost sight of the effect he produced, as he stood up, shaking all over.

“I come to you because you are the one man who can most easily understand the thing I have been concealing for a good many years.”

The Duke was irritated.  Confound the objectionable idiot, what did he mean by taking that intimate tone with a man who was not prepared to concern himself in his affairs?

“Excuse me,” he said, holding up an authoritative hand, “are you going to make a confession?  I don’t like such things.  I prefer to be excused.  Personal confidences are not parochial matters.”

“This one is.”  And Sir Nigel was sickeningly conscious that he was putting the statement rashly, while at the same time all better words escaped him.  “It is as much a parochial matter,” losing all hold on his wits and stammering, “as was—­as was—­the affair of—­your wife.”