"Put it down, and go on with your packing; you have no time to spare." The man laid the case on a marble table near, and went out. Guy took the miniature and regarded it steadfastly for some moments, then he looked up and caught my eye. Perhaps there was an eager appeal there (for I knew well whose likeness lay before him) which displeased and provoked his sullen temper; for he frowned darkly, and then his clenched hand fell with the crashing weight of a steam-hammer. Nothing but a heap of shivered wood, glass, and ivory remained of what had been the life-like image of Constance Brandon. A thrill of horror shot through me icily, and a low cry burst from my lips. I felt at that moment as if the blow had fallen, not on the portrait, but on the original. But I kept silence. The dark hour was on Saul, and I knew no spell to chase the evil spirit away. Guy spoke at last. His manner was unusually chill and constrained. "I expect to meet Mohun in Paris, and we shall probably go on to Vienna. I hardly like troubling you with commissions, but I must. Listen. I leave my own name--and another person's--in your keeping. I wish it to be clearly understood that the engagement was broken off by Miss Brandon, not by me. If you hear any man speak disparagingly of her in connection with what has passed, you can insult him on my behalf as grossly as you please. I will be here, as fast as steam can bring me, to back what you may have said or done. This is the only point in which I hope you will guard my honor. As for blaming _me_, they may say what they please. Do you quite understand? And will you promise?" I did promise; and so, after a few more last words, we parted, more coldly than we had ever done in all the years through which we had been intimate. Guy left England the same evening, and descended like a thunder-clap on the joyous little _menage_ in the Rue de la Madeleine, where Forrester and his bride were still fluttering their wings in the honeymoon-shine of post-nuptial spring. They were miraculously happy, those two. Indeed, they seemed to have only one taste between them, and that was Charley's. If he felt inclined, which was not seldom, to utter inaction, his wife encouraged him in his laziness, sitting contentedly for hours on her footstool, with her silky hair just within reach of his indolent hand. If, after dinner, he suggested the "Italiens," or the "Bouffes," it was always precisely that theatre that she had been thinking of all the morning. She was in the seventh heaven when he won a hurdle-race in the Champ de Mars.