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 met me with reproaches that I
was forgetting the recent death of my brother. She won't have any one now
if she knows it, and I had to send for you quietly. Did you see how she
stared last night when you came in?"
Mr.
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