When he left Julia Brabazon in the garden, Harry Clavering did not go at once home to the rectory, but sauntered out all alone into the park, intending to indulge in reminiscences of his past romance.  It was all over, that idea of having Julia Brabazon for his love; and now he had to ask himself whether he intended to be made permanently miserable by her wordly falseness, or whether he would borrow something of her wordly wisdom, and agree with himself to look back on what was past as a pleasurable excitement in his boyhood.  Of course we all know that really permanent misery was in truth out of the question.  Nature had not made him physically or mentally so poor a creature as to be incapable of a cure.  But on this occasion he decided on permanent misery.  There was about his heart—­about his actual anatomical heart, with its internal arrangement of valves and blood-vessels—­a heavy dragging feeling that almost amounted to corporeal pain, and which he described to himself as agony.  Why should this rich, debauched, disreputable lord have the power of taking the cup from his lip, the one morsel of bread which he coveted from his mouth, his one ingot of treasure out of his coffer?  Fight him!  No, he knew he could not fight Lord Ongar.  The world was against such an arrangement.  And in truth Harry Clavering had so much contempt for Lord Ongar, that he had no wish to fight so poor a creature.  The man had had delirium tremens, and was a worn-out miserable object.  So at least Harry Clavering was only too ready to believe.  He did not care much for Lord Ongar in the matter.  His anger was against her; that she should have deserted him for a miserable creature, who had nothing to back him but wealth and rank!

There was wretchedness in every view of the matter.  He loved her so well, and yet he could do nothing!  He could take no step toward saving her or assisting himself.  The marriage bells would ring within a month from the present time, and his own father would go to the church and marry them.  Unless Lord Ongar were to die before then by God’s hand, there could be no escape—­and of such escape Harry Clavering had no thought.  He felt a weary, dragging soreness at his heart, and told himself that he must be miserable for-ever—­not so miserable but what he would work, but so wretched that the world could have for him no satisfaction.

What could he do?  What thing could he achieve so that she should know that he did not let her go from him without more thought than his poor words had expressed?  He was perfectly aware that in their conversation she had had the best of the argument—­that he had talked almost like a boy, while she had talked quite like a woman.  She had treated him de haut en bas with all that superiority which youth and beauty give to a young woman over a very young man.  What could he do?  Before he returned to the rectory, he had made up his mind what he would do, and on the following morning Julia Brabazon received by the hands