Another young fellow, Hamerton! Then it was not to meet him, Rivers, that Trevanion was waiting. There was no special expectation of him. It was Rex, the schoolboy, and young Hamerton who was to cheer them up--Rex, a sulky young cub, and Hamerton, a thick-headed rustic. John went off quite unconscious of the arrow he had planted in his friend’s heart, and Rivers turned away, with a blank countenance, to his hotel, feeling that he had fallen down--down from the skies into a bottomless abyss. All this while, during so many days of travel, he had been coming towards her; now he seemed to be thrown back from her--back into uncertainty and the unknown. He lingered a little as the train from Paris came in, and heard John Trevanion’s cheerful “Oh, here you are!” and the sound of the other voices. It made his heart burn to think of young Hamerton--the young clodhopper!--going to her presence, while he went gloomily to the hotel. His appearance late for dinner presented a new and welcome enigma to the company who dined at the _table d’hôte_. Who was he? Some one fresh from India, no doubt, with that bronzed countenance and hair which had no right to be gray. There was something distinguished about his appearance which everybody remarked, and a little flutter of curiosity to know who he was awoke, especially among the English people, who, but that he seemed so entirely alone, would have taken him for Sir Ruby himself. Rivers took a little comfort from the sense of his own importance and of the sensation made by his appearance. But to arrive here with his mind full of Rosalind, and to find himself sitting alone at a foreign _table d’hôte_, with half the places empty and not a creature he knew, chilled him ridiculously--he who met people he knew in every out-of-the-way corner in the earth. And all the time Hamerton at her side--Hamerton, a young nobody! There was no doubt that it was very hard to bear. As soon as dinner was over he went out to smoke his cigar and go over again, more ruefully than ever, his prospects of success. It was a brilliant moonlight night, the trees in the hotel garden standing, with their shadows at their feet, in a blackness as of midnight, while between, every vacant space was full of the intense white radiance. He wandered out and in among them, gloomily thinking how different the night would have been had he been looking down upon the silver lake by the side of Rosalind. No doubt that was what she was doing. Would there be any recollection of him among her thoughts, or of the question he had asked her in the conservatory at the Elms? Would she think he was coming for his answer, and what in all this long interval had she been making up her mind to reply?