When the demon of his craving for strong drink leaped upon Harry and held him, he broke from every other detaining grasp. It was to no purpose that Fan, Horace, and Oliver put force on their inclinations in order to go with desperate perseverance on the endless round of theatres, public gardens, and concerts, as if the travellers had been so many schoolboys abroad for their holidays, or as if individual tastes and domestic habits were unknown to the party. Harry would not suffer Fan by his side; he shook off his brother and Oliver. He quitted them, and defied them to follow him, or he fled from them and outsped them by the terrible strength and subtlety of his madness. They lost him for intervals of hours, increasing to days and even weeks. The journeyings of the party came to an abrupt stop; all their previous arrangements were upset. Fan and Horry, with Oliver added as a third to the group, looked at each other, on the first sign of the repetition of the miserable scenes, as the two had looked in the familiar farmhouse at home. Sometimes Fan sat alone in the strange hotel room listening to the careless coming and going of the other travellers; through the long hours from sunset to darkness and the white glimmering dawn, while Horace and Oliver, going different ways, hunted through all the _places_ and _markets_; the hotels and cafés—conspicuous or obscure—the houses of entertainment where questionable hosts received strangers more likely to prove thieves than angels taken in unawares—the hunters studiously keeping themselves, as far as they might, unseen, till they stalked their prey. Thrice happy for all if it had been the beast of the field, and not merely a creature made in the image of God, degraded into a condition lower than that of the brutes, over which he had been ordained lord and king. A horse or a dog would have been wiser than Harry Stanhope, and would have guided him with advantage, in the circumstances. Or it might be the man-stalkers returned, with reluctant feet, empty hands, and hanging heads, to the hapless woman condemned to sit and wait in vain. In these altered times, Harry, who was so fond of his kind, constituted the great insurmountable obstacle to any genial fraternisation between his family and other travelling parties who were in the wholesome odour of unsullied respectability and the vigour and gladness of moral health and strength. He condemned his companions—not simply to a tedious and irritating quarantine, but to a sad and chilling isolation, as they drew away from their neighbours to hide their wound and its humiliating cause under a tightly grasped mantle, which must never be thrown open.