Then they fought, and Lucian was worsted, as usual, and came to his senses, and for the rest of the day Sprats was decent to him and even sympathetic. She was always intrusted with his confidence, however much they differed, and during the rest of the time which Haidee spent at the Castle she had to listen to many ravings, and more than once to endure the reading of a sonnet or a canzonet with which Lucian intended to propitiate the dark-eyed nymph whose image was continually before him. Sprats, too, had to console him on those days whereon no sight of Miss Brinklow was vouchsafed. It was no easy task: Lucian, during these enforced abstinences from love’s delights and pleasures, was preoccupied, taciturn, and sometimes almost sulky. ‘You’re like a bear with a sore head,’ said Sprats, using a homely simile much in favour with the old women of the village. ‘I don’t suppose the Dolly kid is nursing her sorrows like that. I saw Dicky Feversham riding up to the Castle on his pony as I came in from taking old Mother Hobbs’s rice-pudding.’ Lucian clenched his fists. The demon of jealousy was aroused within him for the first time. ‘What do you mean?’ he cried. ‘Don’t mean anything but what I said,’ replied Sprats. ‘I should think Dickie has gone to spend the afternoon there. He’s a nice-looking boy, and as his uncle is a peer of the rel-lum, Mrs. Brinklow doubtless loves him.’ Lucian fell into a fever of rage, despair, and love. To think that Another should have the right of approaching His Very Own!--it was maddening; it made him sick. He hated the unsuspecting Richard Feversham, who in reality was a very inoffensive, fun-loving, up-to-lots-of-larks sort of schoolboy, with a deadly hatred. The thought of his addressing the Object was awful; that he should enjoy her society was unbearable. He might perhaps be alone with her--might sit with her amongst the ruined halls of the Castle, or wander with her through the woods of Simonstower. But Lucian was sure of her--had she not sworn by every deity in the lover’s mythology that her heart was his alone, and that no other man should ever have even a cellar-dwelling in it? He became almost lachrymose at the mere thought that Haidee’s lofty and pure soul could ever think of another, and before he retired to his sleepless bed he composed a sonnet which began-- /p ‘Thy dove-like soul is prisoned in my heart With gold and silver chains that may not break,’ p/ and concluded-- /p ‘While e’er the world remaineth, thou shalt be Queen of my heart as I am king of thine.’ p/