ffended,
or some one absent has offended, and we are handy. The spiteful hag of
power ties a wife to us; perhaps for the reason, that we behaved in the
spirit of a better time by being chivalrously honourable. Wives are just
as inexplicable curses, just as ineradicable and astonishing as humps
imposed on shapely backs.

Fleetwood lashed his horses until Carinthia's low cry of entreaty rose
to surprise. That stung him.

'Leave the coachman to his devices: we have an appointment and must keep
it,' he said.

'They go so willingly.'

'Good beasts, in their way.'

'I do not like the whip.'

'I have the same objection.'

They were on the level of the vale, going along a road between farms and
mansions, meadows and gardenplots and park-palings. A strong warm wind
drove the pack of clouds over the tree-tops and charged at the branches.
English scenery, animating air; a rouse to the blood and the mind.
Carinthia did not ask for hues. She had come to love of the dark land
with the warm lifting wind, the big trees and the hedges, and the
stately houses, and people requiring to be studied, who mean well and
are warm somewhere below, as chimneypots are, though they are so stiff.

English people dislike endearments, she had found. It might be that her
husband disliked any show of fondness. He would have to be studied very
much. He was not like others, as Henrietta had warned her. From thinking
of him fervidly, she was already past the marvel of the thought that she
called him husband. At the same time, a curious intimation, gathered she
knew not whence, of the word 'husband' on a young wife's lips as being a
foreign sound in England, advised her to withhold it. His behaviour was
instructing her.

'Are you weather-wise?--able to tell when the clouds will hold off or
pelt,' he said, to be very civil to a neighbour.

She collected her understanding, apparently; treating a conversational
run of the tongue as a question to be pondered; and the horses paid for
it. Ordinarily he was gentle with his beasts. He lashed at her in his
heart for perverting the humanest of men.

'Father was,' she replied.

'Oh! I have heard of him.'

Her face lightened. 'Father had a great name in England.'

'The Old Buccaneer, I think.'

'I do not know. He was a seaman of the navy, like Admiral Fakenham is.
Weather at sea, weather on the mountains, he could foretell it always.
He wrote a book; I have a copy you will read. It is a book of Maxim