an's
pitch above woman's beauty was perceived to be no intermittent beam, but
so living as to take the stamp of permanence. More than to say it
was hers, it was she. What a deadly peril brought into view was her
character-soul, some call it: generally a thing rather distasteful in
women, or chilling to the masculine temperament. Here it attracts. Here,
strange to say, it is the decided attraction, in a woman of a
splendid figure and a known softness. By rights, she should have more
understanding than to suspect the husband as guilty of designs done to
death in romances. However, she is not a craven who compliments him by
rearing him, and he might prove that there is no need for fear. But she
would be expecting explanations before the reconcilement. The bosom
of these women will keep on at its quick heaving until they have heard
certain formal words, oaths to boot. How speak them?

His old road of the ladder appeared to Fleetwood an excellent one for
obviating explanations and effecting the reconcilement without any
temporary seeming forfeit of the native male superiority. For there she
is at Esslemont now; any night the window could be scaled. 'It is my
husband.' The soul was in her voice when she said it.

He remembered that it had not ennobled her to him then; had not
endeared; was taken for a foreign example of the childish artless,
imperfectly suited to our English clime.' The tone of adorable
utterances, however much desired, is never for repetition; nor is
the cast of divine sweet looks; nor are the particular deeds-once
pardonable, fitly pleaded. A second scaling of her window--no, night's
black hills girdle the scene with hoarse echoes; the moon rushes out of
her clouds grimacing. Even Fleetwood's devil, much addicted to cape and
sword and ladder, the vulpine and the gryphine, rejected it.

For she had, by singular transformation since, and in spite of a
deluging grotesque that was antecedently incredible, she had become
a personage, counting her adherents; she could put half the world in
motion on her side. Yell those Welshmen to scorn, they were on a plane
finding native ground with as large a body of these English. His baser
mind bowed to the fact. Her aspect was entirely different; her attitude
toward him as well: insomuch that he had to chain her to her original
features by the conjuring of recollected phrases memorable for the vivid
portraiture of her foregone simplicity and her devotion to 'my husband.'