When they passed out into the street and were on their way to St. James’s Park, Tom Tantillion was in a state of much interested excitement.

“What shall you do with it, Roxholm?” he asked.  “Have it set in a rich gold frame and hung up on the gallery at Osmonde House—­or in the country?  Good Lord!  I dare not have carried her to my lodgings if I could have bought her.  She would be too high company for me and keep me on my best manners too steady.  A man dare not play the fool with such a creature staring at him from the wall.  ’Tis only a man who is a hero, and a stately mannered one, who could stay in the same room with her without being put out of countenance.  Will she rule in the gallery in town or in the country?”

“She will not be framed or hung, but laid away,” answered Roxholm.  “I bought her that no ill-mannered rake or braggart should get her and be insolent to her in her own despite when she could not strike him to his knees and box his ears, as she did the Chaplain’s—­being only a woman painted on canvas.”  And he showed his white, strong teeth a little in a strange smile.

“What!” cried Tom.  “You did not buy her for your own pleasure——?”

The Marquess stopped with a sudden movement.

“On my faith!” he exclaimed, “there is the Earl of Dunstanwolde.  He sees us and comes towards us.”

CHAPTER XIII

“Your—­Grace!”

“Come with me, Gerald, to Dunstan’s Wolde,” said my lord, as they sat together that night in his town-house.  “I would have your company if you will give it me until you rejoin Marlborough.  I am lonely in these days.”

His lordship did not look his usual self, seeming, Roxholm thought, worn and sometimes abstracted.  He was most kind and affectionate, and there was in his manner a paternal tenderness and sympathy which the young man was deeply touched by.  If it had been possible for him to have spoken to any living being of the singular mental disturbance he had felt beginning in him of late, he could have confessed it to Lord Dunstanwolde.  But nature had created in him a tendency to silence and reserve where his own feelings were concerned.  As to most human beings there is a consolation in pouring forth the innermost secret thoughts at times, to him there was support in the knowledge that he held all within his own breast and could reflect upon his problems in sacred privacy.  At this period, indeed, his feelings were such as he could scarcely have described to any one.  He was merely conscious of a sort of unrest and of being far from comprehending his own emotions.  They were, indeed, scarcely definite enough to be called emotions, but only seemed shadows hovering about him and causing him vaguely to wonder at their existence.  He was neither elated nor depressed, but found himself confronting fancies he had not confronted before, and at times regarding the course of events with something of the feeling of a fatalist.  There was a thing it seemed from which he could not escape, yet in his deepest being was aware that he would have preferred to avoid it.  No man wishes to encounter unhappiness; he was conscious remotely that this preference for avoidance arose from a vaguely defined knowledge that in one direction there lay possibilities of harsh suffering and pain.