The world seemed to swarm with people, all intent on chattering about his affairs, on discussing and misunderstanding this sensation in the life of the lion of the season. A lovely titbit for the social gossips to relish! He could not possibly meet people, shake their hands, answer their stupid questions, listen to the hateful sympathy of the more intimate. He must shut up the house and fly from London. But where could he hide himself for the time? He resumed his pacing to and fro, sometimes perambulating the studio to vary his movement. So far he was under the influence of the first excitement attendant on the rupture. Whatever his astonishment at having been ousted in the affections of a woman by a man whom he had more or less despised, whose rivalry he had brushed aside as easily as a cobweb; the bare idea that a broken engagement should figure in his life was so distasteful that it made the wound to his mere vanity a secondary matter. He could not at once extricate his mind from the contemplation of these immediate bearings of the event. His relation to Lady Betty, indeed, was present to him, but he had not yet turned the flood of his thought in that direction. In the reaction of feeling, however, when the first sting and shock had somewhat lightened, it was natural for his whole soul to turn to Lady Betty longingly; not with the joyous impulse of one unexpectedly free to claim his true comrade, but like a bruised child to find relief for his hurt. But how to reach her again he did not know. So thorough had been their sacrifice that he had even promised never to write to her. Besides, letters would only follow her if sent through a certain banker, whose name she had withheld from him. And though now he felt that circumstances absolved him from the promise, he did not care that such a letter as he must write, once he put pen to paper, should go to her father's deserted house, and thence be tossed about the world in perhaps a futile pursuit, with the possible fate of being read in a dead-letter office, and finally returned to him. He would wait awhile. Perhaps, if the gossip got abroad, it might by some circuitous route arrive even as far as Lady Betty's ears, and then no doubt she would announce her whereabouts to him. The pressing problem before him was to decide on his own plans for the immediate present. How stale and tired he was! How terribly he had toiled these past months, sustained by he knew not what mysterious energy. It seemed almost as if he had exerted a supernatural strength, and the work he had accomplished might well have claimed double the period. And now, something had suddenly gone snap. He was finished; a mere hollow shell of a man. His mind turned again towards other climes and other skies. It seemed so long since he had crossed the Channel; so many years indeed that it was hateful to count them. It reminded him too much of the big slice of his life, the years of his prime, that had been so miserably sterile.