“Lady Constance!—I have something rather serious and painful to tell you—and I am glad of this opportunity to tell you before you hear it from any one else. There was a row in college last night, or rather this morning, after the ball, and Otto Radowitz was hurt.” The colour rushed into Connie’s face. She stopped. All around them the park stretched, grey and empty. There was no one in sight on the path where they had met. “But not seriously,” she breathed. “His hand was hurt in the scuffle!” Constance gave a cry. “His hand!” “Yes. I knew you’d feel that. It was a horrible shame—and a pure accident. But you’d better know the whole truth. It was a rag, and I was in it. But, of course, nobody had the smallest intention of hurting Radowitz.” “No—only of persecuting and humiliating him!” cried Constance, her eyes filling with tears. “His hand!—oh, how horrible! If it were really injured, if it hindered his music—if it stopped it—it would just kill him!” “Very likely it is only a simple injury which will quickly heal,” said Falloden coldly. “Sorell has taken him up to town this afternoon to see the best man he can get. We shall know to-morrow, but there is really no reason to expect anything—dreadful.” “How did it happen?” “We tried to duck him in Neptune—the college fountain. There was a tussle, and his hand was cut by a bit of broken piping. You perhaps don’t know that he made a speech last week, attacking several of us in a very offensive way. The men in college got hold of it last night. A man who does that kind of thing runs risks.” “He was only defending himself!” cried Constance. “He has been ragged, and bullied, and ill-treated—again and again—just because he is a foreigner and unlike the rest of you. And you have been the worst of any—you know you have! And I have begged you to let him alone! And if—if you had really been my friend—you would have done it—only to please me!” “I happened to be more than your friend!”—said Falloden passionately. “Now let me speak out! You danced with Radowitz last night, dance after dance—so that it was the excitement, the event of the ball—and you did it deliberately to show me that I was nothing to you—nothing!—and he, at any rate, was something. Well!—I began to see red. You forget—that”—he spoke with difficulty—“my temperament is not exactly saintly. You have had warning, I think, of that often. When I got back to college, I found a group of men in the quad reading the skit in _The New Oxonian_. Suddenly Radowitz came in upon us. I confess I lost my head. Oh, yes, I could have stopped it easily. On the contrary, I led it. But I must ask you—because I have so much at stake!—was I alone to blame?—Was there not some excuse?—had you no part in it?” He stood over her, a splendid accusing figure, and the excited girl beside him was bewildered by the adroitness with which he had carried the war into her own country.