We have told in our first volume that Hew was a 'good hater'—one precisely after the heart of the great Lexicographer—and how he had made a vow to revenge himself on Falconer—a vow all the deeper for being an unuttered one; and the time to redeem that vow had now come!
Hew's hand passed for a moment lingeringly over Cecil's goblet of champagne. A close observer might have remarked that Hew's hand suddenly opened and shut, and that as he did so the wine frothed up anew and curiously; but no close observer was there, and Hew withdrew some paces, and laughed his noiseless, joyless laugh, as he watched Cecil, while replying smilingly and fondly to some laughing remark of Mary, put his hand to the goblet, lift it from the table, and finish its contents at a draught, like a heated and thirsty young dancer as he was.
Hew then withdrew from their vicinity; but all that followed, followed fast indeed!
Cecil became deadly pale, and an expression of agony came into his face. The lights in the domed roof above, and the figures of the whirling dancers below, seemed to multiply ad infinitum; the music sounded as if receding to a vast distance; the four corners of the hall seemed to be in swift pursuit of each other, as if it revolved on an axis: he read a strange expression of utter dismay in the face and dilated eyes of Mary, who had started from her seat; he made a wild, but futile clutch at the table to support himself, while a half-stifled cry escaped him, and he fell with a crash on the waxed floor, when a crowd instantly gathered round him, and voices in alarm rose on every side.
'Make way there—poor fellow taken ill—the heat—the ventilation here is horrible!' cried one.
'Stand back—stand back, please—air!' said an officer of Lancers, authoritatively.
'Lift him up,' cried another; 'he has fainted.'
'Screwed as an owl, you mean,' said a voice there was no mistaking.
'Silence, sir!' exclaimed Captain Acharn, sternly.
But Hew, with his cruel cold smile, and an ill-suppressed gleam in his parti-coloured eyes, thought,