As he spoke of their being man and wife the girl's heart gave a great leap. Surely, she thought, he must know how much she, too, desired that; and still, as thus she thought, she drew closer to him. But, even as she did so, she whispered: "How that man can injure you or me I know not, my own. Yet--yet--I saw his face to-day, saw the look, the hideous look of rage and spite, he cast at you--and--oh! oh! my love," she wailed, "I fear, I fear." "Fear nothing," he whispered back. "Fear nothing. He is a broken, bankrupt knave, and I am a king's officer; while you are to be my wife. He is harmless." CHAPTER IX. THE END OF THE FIRST ACT. "The question now is," said Lewis Granger to Beau Bufton that night, "what is to be done? How are you, and I, which latter is perhaps of more considerable importance, to continue to exist? I have had no money for a long time, and in a short time you also will have none. What do you intend to do?" As he spoke, he cast his eyes upon the man who now sat the picture of despair in his rooms in the Haymarket, and was, in truth, in about as miserable a frame of mind as it was possible for any person to be. Miserable and broken down in more ways than one; through lack of money as well as a lack of knowledge of where any was to come from; miserable also through the certainty that by to-morrow all London would ring with the manner in which he had been tricked and deceived. While, which was perhaps the worst of all disasters, his long-meditated plan of espousing some heiress or another was now and for ever impossible. Who would marry him, a man who might or might not be the husband of the singing, dancing girl of Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and Marylebone Gardens; what heiress, even though he could get free of Anne Pottle, would not know him in his true colours: those of a fortune-hunter? There was no gibe nor jeer left in him now, not even of that lower-form schoolboy order, which Granger had so often derided with savage contempt. How could he ever jeer and jest at others henceforth? He, who had stood so pitiful and exposed a fool before others that morning. In the future, whatever became of him, he could sneer or scoff no more, for fear that in his teeth should be thrown his own idiocy.