subtlety
and respect. And the reserve with which Elizabeth treated him seemed
nothing more nor less than an exquisite modesty touched and enhanced by
an equally exquisite lack of ideas.

Bindon knew nothing of her wandering affections, nor of the attempt made
by Mwres to utilise hypnotism as a corrective to this digression of her
heart; he conceived he was on the best of terms with Elizabeth, and had
made her quite successfully various significant presents of jewellery
and the more virtuous cosmetics, when her elopement with Denton threw
the world out of gear for him. His first aspect of the matter was rage
begotten of wounded vanity, and as Mwres was the most convenient person,
he vented the first brunt of it upon him.

He went immediately and insulted the desolate father grossly, and then
spent an active and determined day going to and fro about the city and
interviewing people in a consistent and partly-successful attempt to
ruin that matrimonial speculator. The effectual nature of these
activities gave him a temporary exhilaration, and he went to the
dining-place he had frequented in his wicked days in a devil-may-care
frame of mind, and dined altogether too amply and cheerfully with two
other golden youths in their early forties. He threw up the game; no
woman was worth being good for, and he astonished even himself by the
strain of witty cynicism he developed. One of the other desperate
blades, warmed with wine, made a facetious allusion to his
disappointment, but at the time this did not seem unpleasant.

The next morning found his liver and temper inflamed. He kicked his
phonographic-news machine to pieces, dismissed his valet, and resolved
that he would perpetrate a terrible revenge upon Elizabeth. Or Denton.
Or somebody. But anyhow, it was to be a terrible revenge; and the friend
who had made fun at him should no longer see him in the light of a
foolish girl's victim. He knew something of the little property that was
due to her, and that this would be the only support of the young couple
until Mwres should relent. If Mwres did not relent, and if unpropitious
things should happen to the affair in which Elizabeth's expectations
lay, they would come upon evil times and be sufficiently amenable to
temptation of a sinister sort. Bindon's imagination, abandoning its
beautiful idealism altogether, expanded the idea of temptation of a
sinister sort. He figured himself as the implacable, the intricate and
powerful