A cold bath freshened me up wonderfully, and, as they naturally did not expect me in the City on my wedding-day, I had the whole morning to myself, and decided to get through it by taking a brisk walk. Before starting, I sent a bag containing my wedding garments to the Agricultural Hall, where a dressing room had been reserved for me, and then I started, viâ the Seven Sisters Road, for Finsbury Park. As I passed an optician's shop, I happened to see, hanging in the window, several pairs of coloured spectacles, one of which I went in and bought, and walked on with a sense of reassurance. Through the medium of such glasses a lion would lose much of his terrors, and would, at the same time, be unable to detect any want of firmness in my gaze; indeed, if a wild beast can actually be dominated by a human eye, how much more should he be so when that eye is reinforced by a pair of smoked spectacles! [Illustration: "A de Castro can never marry a Craven."] My recollection of the rest of that walk is indistinct. I felt no distress, only a kind of stupor. I tried to fix my thoughts on Lurana, on her strange beauty, and the wondrous fact that in a very few hours the ceremony, which was to unite us, would be, at all events, _commenced_. But at times I had a pathetic sense of the irony which decreed that I, a man of simple tastes and unenterprising disposition, should have fallen hopelessly in love with the only young woman in the United Kingdom capable of insisting on being married in a wild-beast cage. It seemed hard, and I remember envying quite ordinary persons--butchers, hawkers, errand-boys, crossing-sweepers, and the like, for their good fortune in not being engaged to spend any part of that afternoon in a den of forest-bred African lions. However, though there was nothing about the intentions of the Home Office in the early editions of the evening papers, the officials _might_ be preparing a dramatic _coup_ for the last moment. I was determined not to count upon it--but the thought of it kept me up until the time when I had to think of returning, for the idea of flight never for an instant presented itself to me. I was on _parôle_ as it were, and I preferred death by Lurana's side to dishonour and security without her. So anxious was I not to be late, and also to discover whether any communication from the Home Secretary had reached the manager, that I almost hurried back to Islington. I was admitted to the Hall by a private entrance, and shown to the kind of unroofed cabin in which I was to change, and which, being under the balcony and at some distance from the gangway between the stables and the ring, was comparatively private and secluded. Here, after asking an assistant to let Mr Niono know I had arrived, and would like to see him, I waited. The Circus had begun, as I knew from the facts that the blare of the orchestrions was hushed, and that a brass band overhead began and left off with the abruptness peculiar to Circus music.