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."

It was the Duke who stood up now, scarlet with anger. He sprang from
his chair as if he had been a young man in whom some insult had struck
blazin