Those two lords, shut up together in a yacht, were advised by their
situation to be bosom friends, and they quarrelled violently, and were
reconciled, and they quarrelled again; they were explosive chemicals;
until the touch of dry land relieved them of what they really fancied
the spell of the Fiend. For their argumentative topic during confinement
was Woman, when it was not Theology; and even off a yacht, those are
subjects to kindle the utmost hatred of dissension, if men are not
perfectly concordant. They agreed upon land to banish any talk of Women
or Theology, where it would have been comparatively innocent; so they
both desiring to be doing the thing they had sworn they would not do,
the thoughts of both were fastened on one or the other interdicted
subject. They hardly spoke; they perceived in their longing minds,
that the imagined spell of, the Fiend was indeed the bile of the sea,
secreted thickly for want of exercise, and they both regretted the days
and nights of their angry controversies; unfit pilgrims of the Holy
Land, they owned.

To such effect, Lord Fleetwood wrote to Gower Woodseer, as though there
had been no breach between them, from Jerusalem, expressing the wish
to hear his cool wood-notes of the philosophy of Life, fresh drawn from
Nature's breast; and urgent for an answer, to be addressed to his hotel
at Southampton, that he might be greeted on his return home first by his
'friend Gower.'

He wrote in the month of January. His arrival at Southampton was on the
thirteenth day of March; and there he opened a letter some weeks old,
the bearer of news which ought by rights to make husbands proudly happy.

CHAPTER XXVII. WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM

Fleetwood had dropped his friend Lord Feltre at Ancona; his good fortune
was to be alone when the clang of bells rang through his head in the
reading of Gower's lines. Other letters were opened: from the Countess
Livia, from Lady Arpington, from Captain Kirby-Levellier. There was
one from his lawyers, informing him of their receipt of a communication
dated South Wales, December 11th, and signed Owain Wythan; to the
effect, that the birth of a son to the Earl of Fleetwood was registered
on the day of the date, with a copy of the document forwarded.

Livia scornfully stated the tattling world's 'latest.' The captain was
as brief, in ordinary words, whose quick run to the stop could be
taken for a challenge of the eye. It stamped the a