ing the
counter-way of her advance, belonged to his wizardry. The bearing of her
onward was her abandonment to him. Delicious as mountain air, the wind
sang; it had a song of many voices. Quite as much as on the mountains,
there was the keen, the blissful, nerve-knotting catch of the presence
of danger in the steep descents, taken as if swallowed, without swerve
or check. She was in her husband's hands. At times, at the pitch of a
rapid shelving, that was like a fall, her heart went down; and at the
next throb exalted before it rose, not reasoning why;--her confidence
was in him; she was his comrade whatever chanced. Up over the
mountain-peaks she had known edged moments, little heeded in their
passage, when life is poised as a crystal pitcher on the head, in peril
of a step. Then she had been dependent on herself. Now she had the joy
of trusting to her husband.

His hard leftward eye had view of her askant, if he cared to see how she
bore the trial; and so relentlessly did he take the slopes, that the
man inside pushed out an inquiring pate, the two grooms tightened arms
across their chests. Her face was calmly set, wakeful, but unwrinkled:
the creature did not count among timid girls--or among civilized. She
had got what she wanted from her madman--mad in his impulses, mad in his
reading of honour. She was the sister of Henrietta's husband. Henrietta
bore the name she had quitted. Could madness go beyond the marrying of
the creature? He chafed at her containment, at her courage, her silence,
her withholding the brazen or the fawnish look-up, either of which he
would have hated.

He, however, was dragged to look down. Neither Gorgon nor Venus, nor a
mingling of them, she had the chasm of the face, recalling the face of
his bondage, seen first that night at Baden. It recalled and it was
not the face; it was the skull of the face, or the flesh of the spirit.
Occasionally she looked, for a twinkle or two, the creature or vision
she had been, as if to mock by reminding him. She was the abhorred
delusion, who captured him by his nerves, ensnared his word--the doing
of a foul witch. How had it leapt from his mouth? She must have worked
for it. The word spoken--she must have known it--he was bound, or the
detested Henrietta would have said: Not even true to his word!

To see her now, this girl, insisting to share his name, for a slip of
his tongue, despite the warning sent her through her uncle, had that
face much as a lea