As Cashel withdrew, Lucian collapsed into a chair, shaken by the revival of passions and jealousies which he had thought as completely outgrown as the school-boy jackets in which he had formerly experienced them. He tried to think of some justification of his anger--some better reason for it than the vulgar taunt of a bully. He told himself presently that the idea of Lydia marrying such a man had maddened him to strike. As Cashel had predicted, he was beginning to plume himself on his pluck. This vein of reflection, warring with his inner knowledge that he had been driven by fear and hatred into a paroxysm of wrath against a man to whom he should have set an example of dignified self-control, produced an exhausting whirl in his thoughts, which were at once quickened and confused by the nervous shock of bodily violence, to which he was quite unused. Unable to sit still, he rose, put on his hat, went out, and drove to the house in Regent’s Park. Lydia was in her boudoir, occupied with a book, when he entered. He was not an acute observer; he could see no change in her. She was as calm as ever; her eyes were not even fully open, and the touch of her hand subdued him as it had always done. Though he had never entertained any hope of possessing her since the day when she had refused him in Bedford Square, a sense of intolerable loss came upon him as he saw her for the first time pledged to another--and such another! “Lydia,” he said, trying to speak vehemently, but failing to shake off the conventional address of which he had made a second nature, “I have heard something that has filled me with inexpressible dismay. Is it true?” “The news has travelled fast,” she said. “Yes; it is true.” She spoke composedly, and so kindly that he choked in trying to reply. “Then, Lydia, you are the chief actor in a greater tragedy than I have ever witnessed on the stage.” “It is strange, is it not?” she said, smiling at his effort to be impressive. “Strange! It is calamitous. I trust I may be allowed to say so. And you sit there reading as calmly as though nothing had happened.” She handed him the book without a word. “‘Ivanhoe’!” he said. “A novel!” “Yes. Do you remember once, before you knew me very well, telling me that Scott’s novels were the only ones that you liked to see in the hands of ladies?” “No doubt I did. But I cannot talk of literature just--” “I am not leading you away from what you want to talk about. I was about to tell you that I came upon ‘Ivanhoe’ by chance half an hour ago, when I was searching--I confess it--for something very romantic to read. Ivanhoe was a prize-fighter--the first half of the book is a description of a prize-fight. I was wondering whether some romancer of the twenty-fourth century will hunt out the exploits of my husband, and present him to the world as a sort of English nineteenth-century Cyd, with all the glory of antiquity upon his deeds.”