"They have been
here ever since your brother died."
"And before it. The old woman likes her quarters, and has no 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.
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