riestly intercession availed. So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull
consciences can! But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her
injury, should be perfectly civil. She is a woman without emotion. She
is a woman full of emotion, one man knows. She ties him to her, to make
him feel the lash of his remorse. He feels it because of her casting him
from her--and so civilly. If this were a Catholic church, one might go
in and give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing. As it is,
here are the graves; the dead everywhere have their sanctity, even the
heathen.

Fleetwood read the name of the family of Meek on several boards at the
head of the graves. Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five. A
female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life. Ezra Meek gave up
the ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one. A healthy spot,
Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected,
and had a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an
acknowledgement of a desire for the warm smell of incense.

CHAPTER XLIII. ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE

His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the
stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont
up again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist
earthiness of the air off the ironstone. He rode fasting, a good
preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the
Great Nourisher's teats to her young. The earl was relieved of his
dejection by a sudden filling of his nostrils. Fat Esslemont
underneath had no such air. Except on the mornings of his walk over the
Salzkammergut and Black Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn
that deep breath of the satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast
with thankfulness. Huntsmen would know it, if the chase were not urgent
to pull them at the tail of the running beast. Once or twice on board
his yacht he might have known something like it, but the salt sea-breeze
could not be disconnected from his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought
of Feltre swung vapour of incense all about him. Breathing this air of
the young sun's kiss of earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions
of the burnt Oriental gums.

Besides, as he had told his friend, it was the sincerity of the Catholic
religion, not the seductiveness, that won him to a form of homage--the
bend of the head of a foreign observer at a midnight mass. Asceticism,
though it may not