'I shall fulfil all my engagements as if nothing had happened.' 'Much the best way,' she agreed, recognising a stolid courage in him which commanded some admiration. He was facing what he hated most in the world--ridicule; he was forced to realise one of the things that a man least likes to realise--that he has failed to manage a woman whom he has undertaken to manage. No eccentricities of sin or folly in her, no repeated failures to find anything amiss in himself, can take away the sting. 'I can't blame myself,' he said more than once to Mrs. Bonfill; but the conviction of his blamelessness yielded no comfort. She understood his feeling, and argued against it; but it remained with him still, in spite of all she could say. He had always been satisfied with himself; he was very ill-satisfied now. Some malicious spirit in himself seemed to join in the chorus of ill-natured laughter from outside which his pride and sensitiveness conjured to his ears. Beaufort Chance had walked the streets once in fear of the whispers of passers-by saying that he had been proved a rogue. Mervyn walked them, and sat in his place in the House, imagining that the whispers said that he had been made a fool. But he faced all. Barslett bred courage, if not brilliancy; he faced even Beaufort Chance, who sat below the gangway, and screwed round on him a vicious smile the first time he appeared after the announcement. On the whole he behaved well, but he had not even that glimmer of pity for Trix which had shone through his father's horrified pompousness. The movements of her mind remained an utter blank to him; why she had lied, an unsolved mystery. Amidst all his humiliation and his anger, he thanked heaven that such a woman would never now be mistress of Barslett; the affair constituted a terrible warning against experiments in marriage. If the question arose again--and in view of Barslett it must--he would follow the beaten track. In the bottom of his heart--though he confessed it to nobody, no, not to his parents nor to Mrs. Bonfill--he had something of the feeling of an ordinarily sober and strait-laced young man who has been beguiled into 'making a night of it' with rowdy companions, and in the morning hours undergoes the consequences of his unwonted outbreak: his head aches, he is exposed to irreverent comment, he is heartily determined to forswear such courses. Mervyn did not dream of seeking Trix, or of offering an amnesty. To his mind there was no alternative; he washed his hands of her, like Mrs. Bonfill.