“The laugh in his blue eye was damnable,” Roxholm murmured. “’Twas as if there was no help for her or any other poor creature whom he chose to pursue.  The base unfairness of it!  He is equipped with the whole armament—­of lures, of lies, of knowledge, and devilish skill.  There are women, ’tis true, who are his equals; but those who are not—­those who are ignorant and whose hearts he wins, as ’twould be easy for him to win any woman’s who believed his wooing face and voice—­Nay, ’twould be as dastardly as if an impregnable fortress should open all its batteries upon a little child who played before it.  And he stands laughing among his mocking crew—­triumphing, boasting—­in cold blood—­of what he plans to do months to come.  Fate grant he may not come near me often.  Some day I should break his devil’s neck.”

He found himself striding about the room.  He was burning with rage against the unfairness of it all, as he had burned when, a mere child, he pondered on the story of Wildairs.  To-day he was a man, yet his passion of rebellion was curiously similar in its nature to his young fury.  Now, as then, there was naught to be done to help what seemed like Fate.  In a world made up of men all more or less hunters of the weak, ready to accept the theory that all things defenceless and lovely are fair game for the stronger, a man whose view was fairer was an abnormality.

“I do not belong to my time,” he said, flinging himself into his chair again and speaking grimly.  “I am too early—­or too late—­for it, and must be content to seem a fool.”

“There is a Fate,” he said a little later, having sat a space gazing at the floor and deep in thought—­“there is a Fate which seems to link me to the fortunes of these people.  My first knowledge of their wretchedness was a thing which sank deep.  There are things a human being perhaps remembers his whole life through—­and strangely enough they are often small incidents.  I do not think there will ever pass from me my memory of the way the rain swept over the park lands and bare trees the day I stood with my Lord Dunstanwolde at the Long Gallery window, and he told me of the new-born child dragged shrieking from beneath its dead mother’s body.”

Some days later he went to Camylott to pass a few weeks in the country with his parents, who were about to set forth upon a journey to Italy, where they were to visit in state a palace of a Roman noble who had been a friend of his Grace’s youth, they having met and become companions when the Duke first visited Rome in making the grand tour.  ’Twas a visit long promised to the Roman gentleman who had more than once been a guest of their household in England; and but for affairs of his Grace of Marlborough, which Roxholm had bound himself to keep eye on, he also would have been of the party.  As matters stood, honour held him on English soil, for which reason he went to Camylott to spend the last weeks with those he loved, amid the country loveliness.