Victor Stowell spent his first two hours after Janet left him in destroying everything which might remind him of Fenella. Her picture, which Janet had framed and hung over his mantel-piece, he put face-down in a drawer. The flowers she had placed in front of it he flung out of the window. A box full of newspaper cuttings and extracts from books dealing with the hardships of the laws relating to women (the collection of five laborious years) he stuffed into the grate and set fire to. But having done all this he found he had done nothing. Only once, since her childhood, had Fenella been to Ballamoar, yet she had left her ghost all over it. He could not sit on the piazza, or walk down the sandy road to the sea, without being ripped and raked by the thought of her. And sight of the turn of the drive at which she had waved her hand, and turned the glory of her face on him, was enough to make the bluest sky a blank. For a long month he went about with a look too dark for so young a face and a step too heavy for so light a foot, blackening his fate and his future. He never doubted that he had lost something that could never be regained. Without blaming Fenella for so much as a moment he felt humiliated and ashamed, and like a fool who had built his house upon the sand. God, how hollow living seemed! Life had lost its savour; effort was useless and there was nothing left in the world but dead-sea fruit. How much the Deemster had learnt of his trouble he never knew, but one night, as they drew up to the cheeks of the hearth after dinner, he said: "Victor, how would you like to go round the world? Travel is good for a young man. It helps him to get things into proportion." Victor leapt at the prospect of escaping from Ballamoar, but thought it seemly to say something about the expense. "That needn't trouble you," said the Deemster, "and you wouldn't be beholden to me either, for there is something I have never told you." His mother had had a fortune of her own, and the last act of her sweet life had been to make it over to her new-born son, at the discretion of his father, signing her dear will a few minutes before she died, against every prayer and protest, in the tragic and unrecognizable handwriting of the dying. "It was five hundred a year then," said the Deemster, "but I've not touched it for twenty-four years, so it's nine hundred now." "That's water enough to his wheel, I'm thinking," said Dan Baldromma, when he heard of it, and Cæsar Qualtrough was known to say: "It's a horse that'll drive him to glory or the devil, and I belave in my heart I'm knowing which." Two months later Victor Stowell was ready for his journey. Alick Gell was to go with him--that gentleman having scrambled through his examination and prevailed on his mother to prevail on his father to permit him to follow Stowell.