s of coming across Douglas himself, however
much she might try to avoid him. At the same time Lady Marcia wrote
continually, describing the plans that were being made to entertain
her--eager, affectionate letters, very welcome in spite of their oddity
to the girl's sore and orphaned mood. No she really couldn't frame some
clumsy excuse, and throw her aunts over. She must go, and trust to luck.

And there would be Sorell and Otto to fall back upon--to take refuge
with. Sorell had told her that the little rectory on the moors, whither
he and Otto were bound as soon as the boy could be moved, stood
somewhere about midway between her aunts' house and Flood, on the
Scarfedale side of the range of moors girdling the Flood Castle valley.

It was strange perhaps that she should be counting on Sorell's
neighbourhood. If she had often petulantly felt at Oxford that he was
too good, too high above her to be of much use to her, she might perhaps
have felt it doubly now. For although in some undefined way, ever since
the night of the Vice-Chancellor's party, she had realised in him a deep
interest in her, even a sense of responsibility for her happiness, which
made him more truly her guardian than poor harassed Uncle Ewen, she knew
very well that she had disappointed him, and she smarted under it. She
wanted to have it out with him, and didn't dare! As she listened indeed
to his agitated report on Radowitz's injuries, after the first verdict
of the London surgeons, Connie had been conscious of a kind of moral
terror. In the ordinary man of the world, such an incident as the
Marmion ragging of a foreign lad, who had offended the prejudices of a
few insolent and lordly Englishmen, would have merely stirred a jest. In
Sorell it roused the same feelings that made him a lover of Swinburne
and Shelley and the nobler Byron; a devoted reader of everything
relating to the Italian Risorgimento; and sent him down every long
vacation to a London riverside parish to give some hidden service to
those who were in his eyes the victims of an unjust social system. For
him the quality of behaviour like Falloden's towards Otto Radowitz was
beyond argument. The tyrannical temper in things great or small, and
quite independent of results, represented, for him, the worst treason
that man can offer to man. In this case it had ended in hideous
catastrophe to an innocent and delightful being, whom he loved. But it
was not thereby any the worse; the vileness