It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious man of the Romer mould, contending Atlas-like under a weight of enormous schemes, was not one to harbour such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah. There was more in the thing than appears on the surface. The brains of mortal men are queer crucibles, and the smouldering fires that heat them are driven by capricious and wanton guests. Lacrima’s old defeat of the owner of Leo’s Hill--a defeat into which there is no need to descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage--had been a defeat upon what might be called a subliminal or interior plane. It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him, not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past--in a past of some pre-natal incarnation. There are--as is well-known, many instances of this unfathomable conflict between certain human types--types that seem to _find_ one another, that seem to be drawn to one another, by some preordained necessity in the occult influences of mortal fate. It matters nothing in regard to such a conflict, that on one side should be strength, power and position, and on the other weakness and helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has its own laws. It is a case of what a true initiate into the secrets of our terrestrial drama might entitle Planetary Opposition. By some hidden law of planetary opposition, this frail child of the Apennine ridges was destined to provoke, to an apparently quite unequal struggle, this formidable schemer from the money-markets of London. In these strange pre-natal attractions and repulsions between men and women, the mere conventional differences of rank and social importance are as nothing and less than nothing. Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict drive us all backwards and forwards; and if under the ascendance of Sirius in the track of the Sun, the master of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to the humiliation of his daughter’s companion than to his election to the British Parliament, one can only remember that both of them--the strong and the weak--were merely puppets and pawns of elemental forces, compared with which he, as well as she, was as the chaff before the wind.