ace before half-past seven.
She would not hear of any conveyance. She was cheerful, and, as it was
pitiful to see, enjoyed her walk. Hearing of her brother's departure for
the Austrian capital, she sparkled. Her snatches of speech were short
flights out of the meditation possessing her. Gower noticed her easier
English, that came home to the perpetual student he was. She made use
of some of his father's words, and had assimilated them mentally besides
appropriating them: the verbalizing of 'purpose,' then peculiar to his
father, for example. She said, in reply to a hint from him: 'If my lord
will allow me an interview, I purpose to be obedient.' No one could
imagine of her that she spoke broken-spiritedly. Her obedience was to
a higher than a mortal lord: and Gower was touched to the quick through
the use of the word.

Contrasting her with Countess Livia and her cousin, the earl might think
her inferior on the one small, square compartment called by them the
world; but she carried the promise of growth, a character in expansion,
and she had at least natural grace, a deerlike step. Although her
picturesqueness did not swarm on him with images illuminating night,
subduing day, like the Countess Livia's, it was marked, it could tower
and intermittently eclipse; and it was of the uplifting and healing kind
by comparison, not a delicious balefulness.

The bigger houses, larger shops, austere streets of private residences,
were observed by the recent inhabitant of Whitechapel.

'My lord lives in a square,' she said.

'We shall soon be there now,' he encouraged her, doubtful though the
issue appeared.

'It is a summer morning for the Ortler, the Gross-Glockner, the
Venediger,--all our Alps, Mr. Woodseer.'

'If we could fly!'

'We love them.'

'Why, then we beat a wing--yes.'

'For I have them when I want them to sight. It is the feet are so
desirous. I feel them so this morning, after prisonership. I could not
have been driven to my lord.'

'I know the feeling,' said Gower; 'any movement of us not our own
impulse, hurries the body and deadens the mind. And by the way, my dear
lady, I spoke of the earl's commands to this man behind us walking
with your Madge. My father would accuse me of Jesuitry. Ines mentioned
commands, and I took advantage of it.'

'I feared,' said Carinthia. 'I go for my chance.'

Gower had a thought of the smaller creature, greater by position, to
whom she was going for her chance. He allud