It was the announcement of the marriage of Mordaunt Prince at the British Consulate in Naples.

The unutterable perfidy of man!  For the first time in his guileless life Septimus met it face to face.  To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one’s life is another.  It horrified him.  Mordaunt Prince had committed the unforgivable sin.  He had stolen a girl’s love, and basely, meanly, he had slunk off, deceiving her to the last.  To Septimus the lover who kissed and rode away had ever appeared a despicable figure of romance.  The fellow who did it in real life proclaimed himself an unconscionable scoundrel.  The memory of Emmy’s forget-me-not blue eyes turning into sapphires as she sang the villain’s praises smote him.  He clenched his fists and put to incoherent use his limited vocabulary of anathema.  Then fearing, in his excited state, to meet Zora, lest he should betray the miserable secret, he stuffed the newspaper into his pocket, and crept out of the house.

Before his own fire he puzzled over the problem.  Something must be done.  But what?  Hale Mordaunt Prince from his bride’s arms and bring him penitent to Nunsmere?  What would be the good of that, seeing that polygamy is not openly sanctioned by Western civilization?  Proceed to Naples and chastise him?  That were better.  The monster deserved it.  But how are men chastised?  Septimus had no experience.  He reflected vaguely that people did this sort of thing with a horsewhip.  He speculated on the kind of horsewhip that would be necessary.  A hunting crop with no lash would not be more effective than an ordinary walking stick.  With a lash it would be cumbrous, unless he kept at an undignified distance and flicked at his victim as the ring-master in the circus flicks at the clown.  Perhaps horsewhips for this particular purpose could be obtained from the Army and Navy Stores.  It should be about three feet long, flexible and tapering to a point.  Unconsciously his inventive faculty began to work.  When he had devised an adequate instrument, made of fine steel wires ingeniously plaited, he awoke, somewhat shame-facedly, to the commonplaces of the original problem.  What was to be done?

He pondered for some hours, then he sighed and sought consolation in his bassoon; but after a few bars of “Annie Laurie” he put the unedifying instrument back in its corner and went out for a walk.  It was a starry night of frost.  Nunsmere lay silent as Bethlehem; and a star hung low in the east.  Far away across the common gleamed one solitary light in the vicarage windows; the Vicar, good gentleman, finishing his unruffled sermon while his parish slept.  Otherwise darkness spread over everything save the sky.  Not a creature on the road, not a creature on the common, not even the lame donkey.  Incredibly distant the faint sound of a railway whistle intensified the stillness.  Septimus’s own footsteps on the crisp grass rang loud in his ears.  Yet