“I hope you will consider I have done all I can, sir,” he said, looking wistfully at the bank-note, which still lay on the table.  “I shall be ruined if this becomes known.”

The cast-steel smile which was peculiar to him hardened the colonel’s face.

“You must come down on Miss Bellasys for compensation.  She pays well, I have no doubt.  You never get another sou from our side, if it were to keep you from starving.  My second thought was the best, after all; it saved time and—­money. (He put the note back into his purse.) I’ll give you one caution, though.  Keep out of Mr. Livingstone’s way.  If he meets you, after hearing all this, he’ll break your neck, I believe in my conscience.”  So he left him.

For the second time that evening Willis looked in the glass—­the reflection was not so satisfactory.  Was that unseemly crumpled ruin the white tie, sublime in its scientific wrinkles, on which its author had gazed with a pardonable paternal pride?  No wonder that he stamped in wrath, not the less bitter because impotent, while he shook off the dust from his garments as a testimony against Ralph Mohun.

He repaired the damages, though, to the best of his power, and then went off to keep his appointment; but the pates a la bechamelle were as ashes, and the gelee au marisquin as gall to his parched, disordered palate.  He made himself so intensely disagreeable that poor Heloise thenceforth swore an enmity against his compatriots, which endured to the end of her brief misspent existence. “Gredin d’Anglais, va!” she was wont to say, grinding her little white teeth melodramatically, whenever she recalled that dreary entertainment, and the failure of her simple stratagems to enliven her saturnine host.

CHAPTER XXVII.

     “Then let the funeral bells be tolled, a requiem be sung,
     An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young;
     A dirge for her—­the doubly dead, in that she died so young.”

For the first few minutes after the train had moved off Guy was unable to collect his thoughts.  As the tall figure of Mohun passed from his view, it seemed as if a sustaining prop had been suddenly cut away from under him, and he felt more than ever helpless.  The stubborn strength of his character asserted itself before long, and he faced his great sorrow as he would have done an enemy in bodily shape; but neither then, nor for many days after, could he pursue any one train of reflection long unbroken.

First he began to think how Constance would look when he saw her.  Would she be much changed?  How beautiful she was the night they parted, with the blue myosotis gleaming through her bright hair!  Would her eyes be as cold as he remembered them then (he had not seen their last look), or would they forgive him at once, and tell him so?  Not if she knew all.  And then, in hideous contrast