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 of it was only made manifest for all to see.

This hidden passion in him, as he talked, seemed to lay a fiery hand on Constance, she trembled under it, conscience-stricken.  “Does he see the same hateful thing in me?—­though he never says a word to hurt me?—­though he is so gentle and so courteous?”

* * * * *

A tall figure became visible at the end of the street.  Connie shut up her writing and ran upstairs to put on her things.  When she came down, she found Sorell waiting for her with a furrowed brow.

“How is he?” She approached him anxiously.  Sorell’s look changed and cleared.  Had she put on her white dress, had she made herself a vision of freshness and charm, for the poor boy’s sake?  He thought so; and his black eyes kindled.

“Better in some ways.  He is hanging on your coming.  But these are awfully bad times for the nurses—­for all of us.”