What should he do--what should he do? He sat dully, his delicious sweet world of imagination shrunk to unsightly clinkers, very mean and grotesque. Only the real world stretched about him--a shoddy, vulgarly formal affair. A laugh, a mere ironic chest-note, came from him. For to what glorified uses did not men seek to convert this intrinsically tawdry material! They were always sensitive to the befooling holiday spirit, the spirit that is persistently ready to accept specious commonplace at a fancy value. For all the essential purposes of romantic passion he, if he chose, might take his pick (_he_ with his title, his rich competence, and his personal attributes) from the human fair that tinkled and scintillated about him. Yet he must price all this opportunity at so much less worth than that of one set of features as to value it, lying ready to his hand, at a pinch of dust compared with the unattainable. The glamour of the fair was not for him, let him elect to give his philosophy licence without limit. He did, it will be observed, madame la gouvernante (who had been genuinely distraught) something a little less than justice. But, after all, his resentment in the first instance was against Mr Sheridan, and in that, no doubt, he was justified; for he must fail, in the nature of things, to understand what reason but a personal one could have moved that gentleman to manœuvre to circumvent a suitor so frank and so admissible as himself. He called for wine; and, while drinking, for the first time in his life, too much of it, his mood underwent a dozen rallies and relapses. Passion, exasperation, and the most sick desire to possess what now seemed to have evaded him for ever--emotion upon emotion, these wrought in his suffering mind. More than once he was half-stirred to the decision to return immediately to England; and, instantly recalling the duke’s enigmatical suggestion anent the ladies’ return to Paris, he would resolve to remain where he was, preferring the problematical to the chances of hunting counter in the mazes of his own capital. For he must see the girl again--to that he was determined; he must see her again and, crashing at last through the reserve his own diffidence had created, must seek to carry by storm that with which he had so mistakenly temporised. And then suddenly--a vision called up, perhaps, by the unwonted fever in his veins--the figure of Pamela, as he had last seen it, stood holding out to him in its hands the little crushed scarlet blossoms; and he could see the wilful smile and hear the sweet voice offering him the rose of his desire; and all in a moment his eyes were full of tears, and he became shamefully conscious of his surroundings, the very character of which profaned his thought. He thrust his hand in an access of tenderness into his breast. “Monsieur,” said a low, grave voice in his ear, “is in need of sympathy.”