Suddenly she saw a dreadful-looking man coming towards her across the arena. His face had the surface and color of blue granite; his protruding jaws and retreating forehead were like those of an orang-outang. She started from her reverie with a shiver, and, recovering her hearing as well as her vision of external things, became conscious of an attempt to applaud this apparition by a few persons below. The man grinned ferociously, placed one hand on a stake of the ring, and vaulted over the ropes. Lydia now remarked that, excepting his hideous head and enormous hands and feet, he was a well-made man, with loins and shoulders that shone in the light, and gave him an air of great strength and activity. “Ain’t he a picture?” she heard Mellish exclaim, ecstatically. “There’s condition for you!” “Ah!” said Skene, disparagingly. “But ain’t HE the gentleman! Just look at him. It’s like the Prince of Wales walking down Pall Mall.” Lydia, hearing this, looked again, and saw Cashel Byron, exactly as she had seen him for the first time in the elm vista at Wiltstoken, approaching the ring with the indifferent air of a man going through some tedious public ceremony. “A god coming down to compete with a gladiator,” whispered Lord Worthington, eagerly. “Isn’t it, Miss Carew? Apollo and the satyr! You must admit that our mutual friend is a splendid-looking fellow. If he could go into society like that, by Jove, the women--” “Hush,” said Lydia, as if his words were intolerable. Cashel did not vault over the ropes. He stepped through them languidly, and, rejecting the proffered assistance of a couple of officious friends, drew on a boxing-glove fastidiously, like an exquisite preparing for a fashionable promenade. Having thus muffled his left hand so as to make it useless for the same service to his right, he dipped his fingers into the other glove, gripped it between his teeth, and dragged it on with the action of a tiger tearing its prey. Lydia shuddered again. “Bob Mellish,” said Skene, “I’ll lay you twenty to one he stops that rush that you think so much of. Come: twenty to one!” Mellish shook his head. Then the master of the ceremonies, pointing to the men in succession, shouted, “Paradise: a professor. Cashel Byron: a professor. Time!” Cashel now looked at Paradise, of whose existence he had not before seemed to be aware. The two men advanced towards the centre of the ring, shook hands at arm’s-length, cast off each other’s grasp suddenly, fell back a step, and began to move warily round one another from left to right like a pair of panthers. “I think they might learn manners from the gentlemen, and shake hands cordially,” said Alice, trying to appear unconcerned, but oppressed by a vague dread of Cashel. “That’s the traditional manner,” said Lord Worthington. “It is done that way to prevent one from holding the other; pulling him over, and hitting him with the disengaged hand before he could get loose.”