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."

"As I am obliged to be. I should take care not to lay myself open to the
temptation. Neither need you have done it."

"I don't see how I was to help myself. Often and often I wished to have
visitors in the house, but the old woman