Mr Portland had two reasons for not appearing at Usk Hall on the evening of the day he married Nell Llewellyn. In the first place, he did not fancy seeing the countess again after she had heard the truth about her letters; in the second, he foresaw more difficulty in getting away, if he left it till after dinner. To have received a summons to London by telegraph or post in the afternoon, and to have been compelled to quit Usk at once, seemed more feasible to him than to announce his determination before the assembled company, to be submitted to their cross questioning--sent to the railway station in Sir Archibald’s carriage, perhaps accompanied by the genial host himself, and to have to bribe the servants to conceal the fact that he never went at all. After that evening, so he argued, when all the world must know that he had married Nell, he would not mind confessing the little ruse to which he had had recourse, and felt sure of receiving sympathy and forgiveness. So he went to ‘The Three Pilchards’ and engaged his rooms, and ordered his dinner in a state of pleased expectancy. The accommodation was not very grand--the _cuisine_ would, doubtless, not be first-rate, but Nell had never been a _gourmande_ nor a sybarite, and Mr Portland pleased himself with thinking how well he would treat her in the future. What with the various race-meetings he had attended, he had been pretty lucky lately, and the visit to Usk Hall had not failed to recoup him still more. He would be able to take his wife abroad to Paris or Italy, if she so wished it, and show her a little life. Perhaps, though, it would be better to run over to Monte Carlo or Hamburg, and so combine business with pleasure. How divinely handsome she was, ‘a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair!’ With what envious eyes he would be followed by the frequenters of the places he thought of. He had little fear that his wife would be recognised by the herd as Lord Ilfracombe’s former mistress. She had kept herself too much at home for that, and had hardly ever been seen in public whilst living with the earl. It would only be a few of his intimates who would be likely to know her again. And Jack Portland would not have concerned himself about it if they had. He had married his wife for himself--not for the world, and it was welcome to think what it liked of his choice. A few old cats, whose virtue had never been attacked during the best part of a century, might turn up their noses at her; but Nell was strong enough to hold her own, and so was he. If a thought crossed his mind that Ilfracombe, on hearing of his marriage with Nell, might insist on giving her as a wedding portion what she had refused as a peace-offering, we must do him the justice to say that it had no weight with him, excepting as it might prove the earl’s good feeling towards them both, and be the precursor of a renewed intimacy. For, if something of the kind