“If you talk like that, I 'll wring your neck,” said Risca, pausing for à second in his walk up and down Sir Oliver's library, and glaring down at his friend, who reclined on the sofa and regarded him with a smile exasperatingly wise. “You know I'm a fool, and why can't you say it? A man at my time of life! Do you realize that I am twice her age?” And he went on, inveighing now against the pitifully human conventions that restrained him from hurting the chit of a child, and now against the sorcery with which she contrived to invest the chamber wherein she dwelt. “And at my age, too, when I 've run the whole gamut of human misery, the whole discordant thing--_toute la lyre_--when I've finished with the blighting illusion that men call life; when, confound it! I 'm thirty.” Sir Oliver, unable to sleep, came into the room in dressing-gown and slippers. He looked very fragile and broken. “Here 's John,” laughed Herold, “saying that he 's thirty, and an old, withered man, and he 's not thirty. He 's nine-and-twenty.” Sir Oliver looked at John, as only age, with awful wistfulness, can look at youth, and came and laid his hand upon the young man's broad shoulders. “My lad,” said he, “you've had a bad time; but you 're young. You've the whole of your life before you. Time, my dear boy, is a marvellous solvent of human perplexity. Once in a new world, once in that astonishing continent of Australia--” John threw a half-finished cigar angrily into the fire. “I'm not going to the damned continent,” said he. CHAPTER V THUS it came to pass that, for the sake of Stellamaris, Risca remained in London and fought with beasts in Fenton Square. Sometimes he got the better of the beasts, and sometimes the beasts got the better of him. On the former occasions he celebrated the victory by doing an extra turn of work; on the latter he sat idly growling at defeat.