His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.

He wished her ladyship good-night. She stood up and performed a
semi-ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position. She
had a well-bred mother.

Probably she would sleep. No such expectation could soothe the friend,
and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had
ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to
follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of
the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded.
Two intimate associates of the dead man swore to that habit of his.
They lied to get him undisputed Christian burial. Aha! The earl laughed
outright at Chummy Potts's nursery qualms. The old fellow had to do it,
and he lied like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard's family. So much
is owing to our friend.

Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting
men of the world?

A council sat upon the case the whole night long. A committee of the
worldly held argumentation in a lower chamber.

These are nights that weaken us to below the level of women. A shuttle
worked in Fleetwood's head. He defended the men of the world. Lord
Feltre oiled them, damned them, kindled them to a terrific expiatory
blaze, and extinguishingly salved and wafted aloft the released essence
of them. Maniacal for argument, Fleetwood rejected the forgiveness
of sins, if sins they be. Prove them sins, and the suffering is of
necessity everlasting, his insomnia logic insisted. Whichever side he
took, his wife was against him; not in speech, but in her look. She was
a dumb figure among the wranglers, clouded up to the neck. Her look said
she knew more of him than they knew.

He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would
have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal. Knowing
it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the
apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to
propitiate--and his lips pecked the baby's cheek. Its mother held arms
for it immediately.

Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with
little of a mind to see.

The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to
snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular
experiences of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he
said once: 'If you mean to marry