ber of the order of husbands, without
taking it for his fun. Dry material statements presented the reality
she doated to think of. Moreover, the marriage of these two renewed her
belief in true marriages, and their intention to unite was evidence of
love.

'My journey to England was worth all troubles for the meeting Madge,'
she said. 'I can look with pleasure to that day of my meeting her
first--the day, it was then!'

She stopped. Madge felt the quivering upward of a whimper to a sob in
her breast. She slipped away.

'It's a day that has come round to be repaired, Lady Fleetwood,' said
Gower. 'If you will. Will you not? He has had a blow--the death of a
friend, violent death. It has broken him. He wants a month or so in
your mountains. I have thought him hard to deal with; he is humane. His
enormous wealth has been his tempter. Madge and I will owe him our means
of livelihood, enough for cottagers, until I carve my way. His feelings
are much more independent of his rank than those of most noblemen. He
will repeat your kind words to Madge and me; I am sure of it. He has
had heavy burdens; he is young, hardly formed yet. He needs a helper; I
mean, one allied to him. You forgive me? I left him with a Catholic lord
for comforter, who regards my prescript of the study of Nature, when
we're in grief, as about the same as an offer of a dish of cold boiled
greens. Silver and ivory images are more consoling. Neither he nor I
can offer the right thing for Lord Fleetwood. It will be found here. And
then your mountains. More than I, nearly as much as you, he has a
poet's ardour for mountain land. He and Mr. Wythan would soon learn to
understand one another on that head, if not as to management of mines.'

The pleading was crafty, and it was penetrative in the avoidance of
stress. Carinthia shook herself to feel moved. The endeavour chilled her
to a notion that she was but half alive. She let the question approach
her, whether Chillon could pardon Lord Fleetwood. She, with no idea of
benignness, might speak pardon's word to him, on a late autumn
evening years hence, perhaps, or to his friends to-morrow, if he
would considerately keep distant. She was upheld by the thought of her
brother's more honourable likeness to their father, in the certainty
of his refusal to speak pardon's empty word or touch an offending hand,
without their father's warrant for the injury wiped out; and as she had
no wish for that to be done, she could