There was about his heart--about his actual anatomical heart, with its internal arrangement of valves and blood-vessels--a heavy dragging feeling that almost amounted to corporeal pain, and which he described to himself as agony.

Why should this rich, debauched, disreputable lord have the power of taking the cup from his lip, the one morsel of bread which he coveted from his mouth, his one ingot of treasure out of his coffer?
Fight him! No, he knew he could not fight Lord Ongar.

The world was against such an arrangement.

And in truth Harry Clavering had so much contempt for Lord Ongar, that he had no wish to fight so poor a creature.

The man had had delirium tremens, and was a worn-out miserable object.