“Let us forget this, Richard,” said she; “we have both been very foolish.”

Forget, indeed!  Unless Heaven had robbed me of reason, had torn the past from me at a single stroke.  I could not have forgotten.  When I reached my lodgings I sent the anxious Banks about his business and threw myself in a great chair before the window, the chair she had chosen.  Strange to say, I had no sensation save numbness.  The time must have been about two of the clock:  I took no account of it.  I recall Banks coming timidly back with the news that two gentlemen had called.  I bade him send them away.  Would my honour not have Mrs. Marble cook my dinner, and be dressed for Lady Pembroke’s ball?  I sent him off again, harshly.

After a long while the slamming of a coach door roused me, and I was straightway seized with such an agony of mind that I could have cried aloud.  ’Twas like the pain of blood flowing back into a frozen limb.  Darkness was fast gathering as I reached the street and began to walk madly.  Word by word I rehearsed the scene in the drawing-room over the Park, but I could not think calmly, for the pain of it.  Little by little I probed, writhing, until far back in my boyhood I was tearing at the dead roots of that cherished plant, which was the Hope of Her Love.  It had grown with my own life, and now with its death to-day I felt that I had lost all that was dear to me.  Then, in the midst of this abject self-pity, I was stricken with shame.  I thought of Comyn, who had borne the same misfortune as a man should.  Had his pain been the less because he had not loved her from childhood?  Like Comyn, I resolved to labour for her happiness.

What hour of the night it was I know not when a man touched me on the shoulder, and I came to myself with a start.  I was in a narrow street lined by hideous houses, their windows glaring with light.  Each seemed a skull, with rays darting from its grinning eye-holes.  Within I caught glimpses of debauchery that turned me sick.  Ten paces away three women and a man were brawling, the low angry tones of his voice mingling with the screeches of their Billingsgate.  Muffled figures were passing and repassing unconcernedly, some entering the houses, others coming out, and a handsome coach, without arms and with a footman in plain livery, lumbered along and stopped farther on.  All this I remarked before I took notice of him who had intercepted me, and demanded what he wanted.

“Hey, Bill!” he cried with an oath to a man who stood on the steps opposite; “’ere’s a soft un as has put ’is gill in.”

The man responded, and behind him came two more of the same feather, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by an ill-smelling crowd of flashy men and tawdry women.  They jostled me, and I reached for my sword, to make the discovery that I had forgotten it.  Regaining my full senses, I struck the man nearest me a blow that sent him sprawling in the dirt.  A blade gleamed under the sickly light of the fish-oil lamp overhead, but a man crashed through from behind and caught the ruffian’s sword-arm and flung him back in the kennel.