of boyhood. But to-day,
awakening all at once to a keen perception of his hapless state, he
told himself that he had never loved before as he loved now.

He had been hard hit by Miss Tempest. Yes, he acknowledged that past
weakness. He had thought her fairest and most delightful among women,
and he had left the Abbey House dejected and undone. But he had quickly
recovered from the brief fever: and now, reverentially admiring Lady
Mabel's prim propriety, he wondered that he could have ever seriously
offered himself to a girl of Vixen's undisciplined and unbroken
character.

"I should have been a miserable man by this time if she had accepted
me," he thought. "She did not care a straw about the People of Ireland."

He was deeply, hopelessly, irrecoverably in love; and the lady he loved
was to be married to another man in less than a week. The situation was
too awful. What could such a woman as Mabel Ashbourne see in such a man
as Roderick Vawdrey. That is a kind of question which has been asked
very often in the history of men and women. Lord Mallow could find no
satisfactory answer thereto. Mr. Vawdrey was well enough in his way--he
was good-looking, sufficiently well-bred; he rode well, was a
first-rate shot, and could give an average player odds at billiards.
Surely these were small claims to the love of a tenth muse, a rarely
accomplished and perfect woman. If Lord Mallow, in his heart of hearts,
thought no great things of Lady Mabel's poetic effusions, he not the
less respected her for the effort, the high-souled endeavour. A woman
who could read Euripides, who knew all that was best in modern
literature, was a woman for a husband to be proud of.

In this desperate and for the most part unsuspected condition of mind,
Lord Mallow hung upon Lady Mabel's footsteps during the days
immediately before the wedding. Roderick was superintending the
alterations at Briarwood, which were being carried on upon rather an
extravagant scale, to make the mansion worthy of the bride. Lord Mallow
was always at hand, in the orchid-houses, carrying scissors and
adjusting the hose, in the library, in the gardens, in the boudoir. He
was drinking greedily of the sweet poison. This fool's paradise of a
few days must end in darkness, desolation, despair--everything dreadful
beginning with _d;_ but the paradise was so delicious an abode that
although an angel with a flaming sword, in the shape of conscience, was
always standing at the gate