: he felt obliged to command himself in her presence. And
self-command was becoming more and more a difficult task. What he wanted
to say or to do presented itself to him with overmastering force: it
seemed foolishly weak to give up, for the sake of a mere scruple of
conscience, any design on which he had set his heart. And above all
things in life he desired just now to win Kitty Heron for himself.

"She has deceived me," he thought, as he sat alone on the evening of the
day on which she had refused to marry him. "She made me believe that she
cared for me, the little witch, and then she deliberately threw me over.
I suppose she wants to marry Vivian. I'll stop that scheme. I'll tell
her something about Vivian which she does not know."

The fire before which he was sitting burnt up brightly, and threw a red
glow on the dark panelling of the room, on the brocaded velvet of the
old chair against which he leaned his handsome head, on the pale, but
finely-chiselled, features of his face. The look of subtlety, of mingled
passion and cruelty, was becoming engraved upon that face: in moments of
repose its expression was evil and sinister--an expression which told
its own tale of his life and thoughts. Once, in London, when he had
incautiously given himself up in a public place to rejection upon his
plans, an artist said to a friend as they passed him by: "That young
fellow has got the very look I want for the fallen angel in my picture.
There's a sort of malevolent beauty about his face which one doesn't
often meet." Hugo heard the remark, and smoothed his brow, inwardly
determining to control his facial muscles better. He did not wish to
give people a bad impression of him. To look like a fallen angel was the
last thing he desired. In society, therefore, he took pains to appear
gentle and agreeable; but the hours of his solitude were stamping his
face with ineradicable traces of the vicious habits, the thoughts of
crime, the attempts to do evil, in which his life was passed.

The ominous look was strongly marked on his face as he sat by the fire
that evening. It was not the firelight only that gave a strange glow to
his dark eyes--they were unnaturally luminous, as the eyes of madmen
sometimes are, and full of a painful restlessness. The old, dreamy,
sensuous languor was seldom seen in their shadowy depths.

"I will win her in spite of herself," he went on, muttering the words
half-aloud: "I will make her love me whether sh