Frank has lingered on in London, he scarce knows why. He is training his strong, masculine mind to bear the loss of Blanche--for he feels that Blanche is lost to him--just as he would train to make any other effort, or endure any other suffering. His mornings are spent in close and severe study; his afternoons in those athletic exercises at which he is so proficient; and in the evening he goes into _men’s_ society, as gentlemen do when they are sore about the other sex, and tries to be amused, and to enter into the frivolities and pastimes of his associates, and succeeds sometimes indifferently badly, sometimes not at all. Strange visitors are admitted to Frank’s morning-room at the hotel where he puts up--the waiter cannot make him but at all. Now, an engineer, in his Sunday clothes, but with a rough chin and grimy hands, is closeted with him all the morning, and the waiter overhears casual expressions, such as “power,” and “gradients,” and “angles,” and “the motive,” and “the bite,” and “the catch,” which, on the principle of _omne ignotum pro terribili_, make his hair stand on end. Then, just as he had made up his mind that Mr. Hardingstone is _professional_, and not a _real_ gent after all, some live Duke or magnificent Marquis comes in with his hat on, and says, “Frank, my dear fellow, how goes it?” and the waiter’s conclusions are again completely upset. Then an archæologian, with smooth white neckcloth and well-brushed beaver, steps gravely up-stairs, and remains for hours discussing the probable site of some problematic edifice which there is reason to suppose _might_ have been pulled down by the Confessor; and on this interesting topic they lavish a store of knowledge, penetration, and research rather disproportioned to the result arrived at, till the archæologian stays to have luncheon, and shows no small energy even at that. The waiter begins to think Mr. Hardingstone is a gent connected with the British Museum (for which institution he entertains a superstitious reverence), and possibly a fellow-labourer with Layard and Rawlinson. But again, twice a week, an individual is admitted whose general appearance is so much the reverse of the respectable, sleek archæologian, that the waiter finds it impossible to reconcile the contradiction of Mr. Hardingstone’s being, as he terms it, “_in_ with both.” This latter visitor is of athletic frame, and remarkably forbidding countenance, none the less so from an originally snub nose having been smashed into a sort of plaster over the adjoining territory. His hair is cut as short as is consistent with the use of scissors, and his arms, in very tight sleeves, hang down his sides as if they were in the last stage of powerless fatigue. He dresses as though he kept a horse, yet is his gait that of a man who is continually on his legs, active as a cat, and of no mean pedestrian powers. He remains with Mr. Hardingstone about an hour, during which time much shuffling of feet is heard, and much hard