The policeman standing near was a humane man, through having a young family he could hardly keep, and he hesitated about telling them to move on.  Christopher had before this time perceived that the articles were laid down before an old gentleman who was seated in the shop, and that the gentleman was none other than he who had been with Ethelberta in the concert-room.  The discovery was so startling that, constitutionally indisposed as he was to stand and watch, he became as glued to the spot as the other idlers.  Finding himself now for the first time directly confronting the preliminaries of Ethelberta’s marriage to a stranger, he was left with far less equanimity than he could have supposed possible to the situation.

‘So near the time!’ he said, and looked hard at Lord Mountclere.

Christopher had now a far better opportunity than before for observing Ethelberta’s betrothed.  Apart from any bias of jealousy, disappointment, or mortification, he was led to judge that this was not quite the man to make Ethelberta happy.  He had fancied her companion to be a man under fifty; he was now visibly sixty or more.  And it was not the sort of sexagenarianism beside which a young woman’s happiness can sometimes contrive to keep itself alive in a quiet sleepy way.  Suddenly it occurred to him that this was the man whom he had helped in the carriage accident on the way to Knollsea.  He looked again.

By no means undignified, the face presented that combination of slyness and jocundity which we are accustomed to imagine of the canonical jolly-dogs in mediaeval tales.  The gamesome Curate of Meudon might have supplied some parts of the countenance; cunning Friar Tuck the remainder.  Nothing but the viscount’s constant habit of going to church every Sunday morning when at his country residence kept unholiness out of his features, for though he lived theologically enough on the Sabbath, as it became a man in his position to do, he was strikingly mundane all the rest of the week, always preferring the devil to God in his oaths.  And nothing but antecedent good-humour prevented the short fits of crossness incident to his passing infirmities from becoming established.  His look was exceptionally jovial now, and the corners of his mouth twitched as the telegraph-needles of a hundred little erotic messages from his heart to his brain.  Anybody could see that he was a merry man still, who loved good company, warming drinks, nymph-like shapes, and pretty words, in spite of the disagreeable suggestions he received from the pupils of his eyes, and the joints of his lively limbs, that imps of mischief were busy sapping and mining in those regions, with the view of tumbling him into a certain cool cellar under the church aisle.

In general, if a lover can find any ground at all for serenity in the tide of an elderly rival’s success, he finds it in the fact itself of that ancientness.  The other side seems less a rival than a makeshift.  But Christopher no longer felt this, and the significant signs before his eyes of the imminence of Ethelberta’s union with this old hero filled him with restless dread.  True, the gentleman, as he appeared illuminated by the jeweller’s gas-jets, seemed more likely to injure Ethelberta by indulgence than by severity, while her beauty lasted; but there was a nameless something in him less tolerable than this.