He sprung from his seat with a cry of wounded pain and love. "Mother, is it really true?" he asked. "I married that young girl before Heaven, and you tell me that if I persist in returning to her she loses her fair name! If it be so, you have done a very cruel thing." "It is so," said my lady, coldly. "I grant that it seems cruel, but better that than tarnish the name of a whole race." "I shall remarry Leone, mother, the day after I am twenty-one," he said. The countess raised her eyebrows. "The same man does not often make a simpleton of himself in the same fashion, but if you will do it, you will. For the present, if you have any regard for the person who is not your wife, you will let her go home again. I will return and talk over your journey with you." So saying, the Countess of Lanswell quitted the room, leaving her son overwhelmed with a sense of defeat. CHAPTER XVI. LEONE'S DETERMINATION. Lucia, Countess of Lanswell, stood alone in the superb drawing-room at Cawdor. It was evening, one of the warmest and brightest in September. Nearly three months had passed since the fatal marriage which had grieved and distressed her, and now she fondly hoped all her distress was ended. The decree had gone forth that the marriage was null and void; was, in fact, no marriage, Lord Chandos being under age when it was contracted. She said to herself all was null now. True, her son was in a most furious rage, and he had gone to consult half the lawyers in London, but she did not care for that; he was sure to rage and rave; he was a spoiled child, who never in his life had been contradicted or thwarted. The more angry he was the better; she knew by experience the hotter the fire the more quickly it burns away. Had he been cool, calm, collected and silent she would have dreaded the after consequences. "He will exhaust himself with furious words," she said to herself with a slow smile. "When he has done that, all danger will be over." She had smiled when she heard of his rapid journeys, his fierce denunciations, his violent invectives, his repeated oaths that no power on earth should take him from his young wife.