ed into the drawing-room. She had heard of the fate of the poor
child in Wales, she said, without a comment.

'I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal,' he confessed, and was
near on shivering. She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.

Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to
it. She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada.
Her curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the
Pyrenees.

'Hardly the place for you; there's a perpetual heaving of Carlism in
those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers,' he remarked; and
for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a
flowing thought.

He remarked the come and go of it.

He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish
Pyrenees.

Books helped her at present, she said.

Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her
uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower
Woodseer's conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the
rascal Ines.

To which her unreproachful answer, 'You made use of those men, my lord,'
sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre's words, as to the grip
men progressively are held in by their deeds done.

'Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life,' he said,
thinking she might set her considerations on other points of his
character. But this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his
particular estimate of his character, and he spurned it: an act of pride
that drove his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily
became an embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the
woman he called wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who
can be idealized by virtue of their being known. For the young man
embracing a character loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself
and passes into it, to see the creature he is with the other's eyes,
and feel for the other as a very self. Such is the privilege and the
chastisement of the young.

Gower Woodseer's engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject
for expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on
Gower, and where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural
philosopher practically philosophizing.

'The girl shall have a dowry from me,' he said; and the sum named was
large. Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her
now.