It had fallen, then! It had fallen—the crushing blow! Claudia was betrothed to the viscount. He might have been, as everyone else was, prepared for this. But he was not. For he knew that Claudia was perfectly conscious of his own passionate love for her, and he knew that she loved him with almost equal fervor. It is true his heart had been often wrung with jealousy when seeing her with Lord Vincent; yet even then he had thought that her vanity only was interested in receiving the attentions of the viscount; and he had trusted in her honor that he believed would never permit her, while loving himself, to marry another, or even give that other serious encouragement. It is true also that he had never breathed his love to Claudia, for he knew that to do so would be an unpardonable abuse of his position in Judge Merlin's family, a flagrant breach of confidence, and a fatal piece of presumption that would insure his final banishment from Claudia's society. So he had struggled to control his passion, seeing also that Claudia strove to conquer hers. And though no words passed between them, each knew by secret sympathy the state of the other's mind.
But lately, since his brilliant success at the bar and the glorious prospect that opened before him, he had begun to hope that Claudia, conscious of their mutual love, would wait for him only a few short years, at the end of which he would be able to offer her a position not unworthy even of Judge Merlin's daughter.
Such had been his splendid "castle in the air." But now the thunderbolt had fallen and his castle was in ruins.
Claudia, whom he had believed to be, if not perfectly faultless, yet the purest, noblest, and proudest among women; Claudia, his queen, had been capable of selling herself to be the wife of an unloved man, for the price of a title and a coronet—a breath and a bauble!
Claudia had struck a fatal blow, not only to his love for her, but to his honor of her; and both love and honor were in their death-throes!
Anguish is no computer of time. He might have sat there half an hour or half a day, he could not have told which, when he heard the voice of his kind friend calling him.
"Ishmael, Ishmael, my lad, where are you, boy? Come to me!"
"Yes, yes, sir, I am coming," he answered mechanically.
And like one who has fainted from torture, and recovered in bewilderment, he arose and walked down to the study.
Some blind instinct led him straight to the chair that was sitting with its back to the window; into this he sank, with his face in the deep shadow.