He did not believe that Hero would marry Lord Alistair Stuart while he forbade her to. But what he feared was that she would refuse to give him up. He was getting on in years, he had not spared himself, and sooner or later Hero must be free. In the meanwhile he saw before him the prospect of her celibacy, a state abhorrent to his feelings whether as father or as physician. In his own mind he had a husband chosen for Hero--an engineer; one of that class to whom the future seems to be assigned; sane, strong, and self-reliant; a water-drinker, like himself; a man of orderly life and wholesome instincts; an ideal father, for whom what science calls the mechanism of life was really mechanism, and nothing more; a man in whose eyes poetry-books and prayer-books were alike contemptible; one who found no weakness in himself, and tolerated none in others. Vanbrugh compared the husband whom he had chosen for his daughter with the husband she had chosen for herself, and was bewildered and impatient. In those days a certain obscure writer of Jewish blood, who had tried, and failed, to write poems, plays, and novels, had taken vengeance on his more successful brethren by publishing a malignant libel in which he pried with some pruriency into their private lives, and proved for his own consolation that genius is a form of vice, if not a positive crime. Some scraps of scientific language picked out of the works of Professor Lombroso had served to disguise the critic’s rancour, and the mixture had proved more palatable to the public than the author’s literary efforts. The sentiment coarsely vented in this work was that which inspired Sir Bernard Vanbrugh when he thought of Lord Alistair as a husband for his only child. From the envy and more or less feigned Pharisaism of the libeller Vanbrugh’s mind, of course, was free. He had liked Lord Alistair, and been interested by him. In the life that he had led hitherto he had been harmless in the scientist’s view, or, at all events, not harmful enough to call for harsh measures. But now everything was changed. If by the lifting of a finger Sir Bernard could have terminated the young man’s existence, and with it the spell which he had flung over Hero, he would have lifted the finger without an instant’s hesitation or an instant’s remorse. And yet he judged better of Lord Alistair than of some of those splendid types of healthy manhood whom the modern world goes forth to worship, as they practise foul play against each other for a few pounds upon the football field. For he decided to appeal from Hero to her betrothed. He was going to ask the young man to give up voluntarily the prize within his grasp; and somehow he did not think that he should ask in vain. He left the house about the time Lord Alistair usually came round, and met him strolling up the road.