Stephen Gore exchanging epigrams with some princely wit or bending over a pretty woman’s chair was a different creature from Stephen Gore shabby, saddle-sore, jaded to death, riding with an imagined price upon his head and a prophetic mist of blood before his eyes. Throw a man out of his natural environment and he may lose all the genius of self, and even the poise of manhood. Milton seated upon a boat’s thwart in the midst of mad, cursing Jamaica buccaneers would have probably seemed contemptible and a coward. March out a fop in vile clothes, and he may prove a sneaking, cringing, self-shamed thing, for all his soul was in his coat. We are so much the creatures of habit that our habits flatter us like well-trained and obsequious servants, and we lose our dignity and even ourselves without their ministrations. So it had proved with my Lord of Gore that November night after a reckless, memory-haunted ride from something he feared toward something that he was being taught to fear by the bleak, wind-swept loneliness of wild roads in night and in winter. Nature is powerful to work upon a man’s mind when all the primal instincts of hunter or hunted come again to the surface. All the damned out of hell might have been rushing on him through those gibbering, moaning woods. The very trees had grotesque and sinuous hands stretched out to catch and strangle. There had been the physical weariness of it all, the chafing of the saddle, the stiffness, the lust for speed, the flounderings of a tired horse, the hundred and one vexations that break the heart in a man when it has no inspiration to keep it whole. And as the poise and the self-grip of the colder will had slackened, so the emotions had taken law of license and had scrambled abroad over the man’s consciousness. The cool, eclectic, cynical, civilized gentleman gave place to the credulous, elemental, emotional savage. Primitive instincts came to the surface: an awe of death and the invisible, a dread of the dark. My Lord Gore’s nerves were as tremulous as the nerves of a coddled boy when he reined in his steaming horse under the shadow of Thorn tower. His face looked flaccid and yet under strain, he had lost that power and precision of movement that is second nature to a man bred among pomps. He nearly fell as he climbed out of the saddle, looking about him with quick, scared glances such as a child might have given in a dark garden at night.