"But I thought you told me the instrument was no good," Emmet persisted.
"Not as bad as that. It is n't what I should like, but a man must do something, even if it's only to keep in practice. It might stand him in stead some day in a larger place."
Emmet was too much absorbed in himself to catch the hint of restlessness these words conveyed. Leigh's profession, like the ministry, made him, in the mayor's eyes, a being apart from the life with which he was familiar. It naturally did not occur to him that the astronomer had been driven back to his duty by the scourge of suffering, much less that his own wife had wielded the whip. He saw only an inexplicable devotion to an ideal pursuit.
"Well," Leigh continued, with a sudden change of manner, "and how is the mayoralty getting on?"
Emmet's face darkened. "I had it out with Bat Quayle this morning and turned him down hard. He 'll get back at me sooner or later. But that is n't what I came up to see you about. The fact is, I 'm in trouble."
Leigh glanced tentatively at the sheets of paper on his table, covered with unfinished calculations, and hesitated; but his visitor's manner implied an urgent need.
"If I can be of any help to you"—he suggested.
"I'm not so sure of that," Emmet answered gloomily, "as that I want to tell some one what an awful fool I 've made of myself."
"There are others," Leigh replied, with a bitter grin. "I know a triple-expansion ass not a hundred miles from here; so fire away."
Emmet went over to the brasier and warmed his hands, as if embarrassed for words with which to begin. Leigh fumbled in the pocket of his greatcoat and produced his pipe, then drawing up his chair opposite, he sat down to listen. No premonition came to him at that moment that the story his visitor had to tell in any way concerned himself, or would deepen the even melancholy of his present days. He settled himself comfortably, with a sense of justifiable relaxation from toil. The troubles of another might arouse his intellectual sympathy, but they could add no burden to his heart. He even experienced a pleasurable curiosity. Emmet was to some degree a mysterious character to him, though he no longer thought of him in connection with Felicity. Her departure from Warwick had put an end to that suspicion, and made it something of which he was ashamed. He divined indeed that the trouble concerned a woman, but not the woman who had gone away with such evident indifference to any man in Warwick.