“Allow me to present myself, Mr. Fairlie,” he said.  “I come from Blackwater Park, and I have the honour and the happiness of being Madame Fosco’s husband.  Let me take my first and last advantage of that circumstance by entreating you not to make a stranger of me.  I beg you will not disturb yourself—­I beg you will not move.”

“You are very good,” I replied.  “I wish I was strong enough to get up.  Charmed to see you at Limmeridge.  Please take a chair.”

“I am afraid you are suffering to-day,” said the Count.

“As usual,” I said.  “I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.”

“I have studied many subjects in my time,” remarked this sympathetic person.  “Among others the inexhaustible subject of nerves.  May I make a suggestion, at once the simplest and the most profound?  Will you let me alter the light in your room?”

“Certainly—­if you will be so very kind as not to let any of it in on me.”

He walked to the window.  Such a contrast to dear Marian! so extremely considerate in all his movements!

“Light,” he said, in that delightfully confidential tone which is so soothing to an invalid, “is the first essential.  Light stimulates, nourishes, preserves.  You can no more do without it, Mr. Fairlie, than if you were a flower.  Observe.  Here, where you sit, I close the shutters to compose you.  There, where you do not sit, I draw up the blind and let in the invigorating sun.  Admit the light into your room if you cannot bear it on yourself.  Light, sir, is the grand decree of Providence.  You accept Providence with your own restrictions.  Accept light on the same terms.”

I thought this very convincing and attentive.  He had taken me in up to that point about the light, he had certainly taken me in.

“You see me confused,” he said, returning to his place—­“on my word of honour, Mr. Fairlie, you see me confused in your presence.”

“Shocked to hear it, I am sure.  May I inquire why?”

“Sir, can I enter this room (where you sit a sufferer), and see you surrounded by these admirable objects of Art, without discovering that you are a man whose feelings are acutely impressionable, whose sympathies are perpetually alive?  Tell me, can I do this?”

If I had been strong enough to sit up in my chair I should, of course, have bowed.  Not being strong enough, I smiled my acknowledgments instead.  It did just as well, we both understood one another.

“Pray follow my train of thought,” continued the Count.  “I sit here, a man of refined sympathies myself, in the presence of another man of refined sympathies also.  I am conscious of a terrible necessity for lacerating those sympathies by referring to domestic events of a very melancholy kind.  What is the inevitable consequence?  I have done myself the honour of pointing it out to you already.  I sit confused.”