CHAPTER XIX. LEONE'S PROPHECY. No words could do justice to the state of mind in which Lord Chandos found himself after that interview at Cawdor. He rushed back to London. Of the three previous days remaining he spent one in hunting after the shrewdest lawyers in town. Each and all laughed at him--there was the law, plain enough, so plain that a child could read and understand it. They smiled at his words, and said, half-contemptuously, they could not have imagined any one so ignorant of the law. They sympathized with him when he spoke of his young wife, but as for help, there was none. The only bright side to it was this, he could remarry her on the day he came of age. Of that there was and could be no doubt, he said, but he was bent on finding some loop-hole, and marrying her at once, if it were really needful for the ceremony to be performed again. It could not be, and there was nothing for it but to resign himself to the inevitable. He did not know that Leone had heard the terrible sentence, and he dreaded having to tell her. He was worn out with sorrow and emotion. In what words was he to tell her that she was not his wife in the eyes of the law, and that if they wished to preserve her character unspotted and unstained she must leave him at once? He understood his mother's character too well to dare any delay. He was sure that if Leone remained even one day under his roof, when the time came that he should introduce her to the world as his wife, his mother would bring the fact against her, and so prevent her from even knowing people. There was no help for it--he must tell her. He wrote a letter telling her he would be at River View for luncheon on the following day; he knew that he must leave that same evening for the Continent. He would have given the world to have been able to renounce the royal favor, of which he had felt so proud, but he could not. To have done so would have been to have deprived him not only of all position, but to have incurred disgrace. To have refused a favor so royally bestowed would have been an act of ingratitude which would have deprived him of court favor for life. He must go; and when the first pain was over, he said to himself it was, perhaps, the best thing that could have happened. He could not have borne to know that Leone was near him, yet not see or speak to her.