well with his principles of professional honour. His mind was not so
acutely occupied with his private honour. To tell the Duke now of his
marriage would be to load the dice against himself: he felt that the
opportunity for speaking of it had passed.

He seated himself at a table and took from his pocket a letter of Guida's
written many weeks before, in which she had said firmly that she had not
announced the marriage, and would not; that he must do it, and he alone;
that the letter written to her grandfather had not been received by him,
and that no one in Jersey knew their secret.

In reading this letter again a wave of feeling rushed over him. He
realised the force and strength of her nature: every word had a clear,
sharp straightforwardness and the ring of truth.

A crisis was near, and he must prepare to meet it.

The Duke had said that he must marry; a woman had already been chosen for
him, and he was to meet her to-morrow. But, as he said to himself, that
meant nothing. To meet a woman was not of necessity to marry her.

Marry--he could feel his flesh creeping! It gave him an ugly, startled
sensation. It was like some imp of Satan to drop into his ear the
suggestion that princes, ere this, had been known to have two wives--
one of them unofficial. He could have struck himself in the face for the
iniquity of the suggestion; he flushed from the indecency of it; but so
have sinners ever flushed as they set forth on the garish road to
Avernus. Yet--yet somehow he must carry on the farce of being single
until the adoption and the succession had been formally arranged.