amid the uniforms, the jewels, and the festoons or roses hanging across
the ballroom. The barbaric, overdecorated scene, with all its
suggestions of a luxurious and self-confident world, where every one was
rich and privileged, or hunting riches and privilege--a world without
the smallest foreboding of change, the smallest doubt of its own right
to exist--forced upon him by contrast the recollection of the hour he
had just spent with Mr. Gregory in his father's dusty dismantled
library. He and his were, it seemed, "ruined"--as many people here
already guessed. He looked at the full-length Van Dycks on the wall of
the Tamworths' ballroom, and thought, not without a grim leap of humour,
that he would be acting showman and auctioneer, within a few days
perhaps, to his father's possessions of the same kind.

But it was not the loss of money or power that was separating him from
Constance Bledlow. He knew her well enough by now to guess that in spite
of her youth and her luxurious bringing up, there was that in her which
was rapidly shaping a character capable of fighting circumstance, as her
heart might bid. If she loved a man she would stand by him. No, it was
something known only to her and himself in all those crowded rooms. As
soon as he set eyes on her, the vision of Radowitz's bleeding hand and
prostrate form had emerged in consciousness--a haunting presence,
blurring the many-coloured movements of the ballroom.

And yet it was not that maimed hand, either, which stood between himself
and Constance. It was rather the spiritual fact behind the visible--that
instinct of fierce, tyrannical cruelty which he had felt as he laid his
hands on Radowitz in the Oxford dawn a month ago. He shrank from it now
as he thought of it. It blackened and degraded his own image of himself.
He remembered something like it years before, when he had joined in the
bullying of a small boy at school--a boy who yet afterwards had become
his good friend. If there is such a thing as "possession," devilish
possession, he had pleaded it on both occasions. Would it, however, have
seemed of any great importance to him now, but for Constance Bledlow's
horror-struck recoil? All men of strong and vehement temperament--so his
own defence might have run--are liable to such gusts of violent, even
murderous feeling; and women accept it. But Constance Bledlow,
influenced, no doubt, by a pale-blooded sentimentalist like Sorell, had
refused to accept it.

"