n of vital
comfort:

"He has only excited you, I'm afraid, a little more than is good for
you. Isn't your dear old head a little too high?" Nick regarded himself
as justly banished, and he quitted the room with a ready acquiescence in
any power to carry on the scene of which Mrs. Lendon might find herself
possessed. He felt distinctly brutal as he heard his host emit a weak
exhalation of assent to some change of position. But he would have
reproached himself more if he had wished less to guard against the
acceptance of an equivalent for duties unperformed. Mr. Carteret had had
in his mind, characteristically, the idea of a fine high contract, and
there was something more to be said about that.

Nick went out of the house and stayed away for two or three hours, quite
ready to regard the place as quieter and safer without him. He haunted
the abbey as usual and sat a long time in its simplifying stillness,
turning over many things. He came back again at the luncheon-hour,
through the garden, and heard, somewhat to his surprise and greatly to
his relief, that his host had composed himself promptly enough after
their agitating interview. Mrs. Lendon talked at luncheon much as if she
expected her brother to be, as she said, really quite fit again. She
asked Nick no awkward question; which was uncommonly good of her, he
thought, considering that she might have said, "What in the world were
you trying to get out of him?" She only reported to our young man that
the invalid had every hope of a short interview about half-past seven, a
_very_ short one: this gentle emphasis was Mrs. Lendon's single tribute
to the critical spirit. Nick divined that Mr. Carteret's desire for
further explanations was really strong and had been capable of
sustaining him through a bad morning, capable even of helping him--it
would have been a secret and wonderful momentary conquest of
weakness--to pass it off for a good one. He wished he might make a
sketch of him, from the life, as he had seen him after breakfast; he had
a conviction he could make a strong one, which would be a precious
memento. But he shrank from proposing this--the dear man might think it
unparliamentary. The doctor had called while Nick was out, and he came
again at five o'clock without that inmate's seeing him. The latter was
busy in his room at that hour: he wrote a short letter which took him a
long time. But apparently there had been no veto on a resumption of
talk, for at hal