ut life is a continuous
fight; and members of the social world display its degree of
civilization by fighting in armour; most of them are born in it; and
their armour is more sensitive than their skins. It was Fleetwood's
instinct of his inability to fling it off utterly which warned him of
his loss of the wife, whose enthusiasm to wait on her brother in danger
might have subsided into the channel of duty, even tenderness, had
he been able resolutely to strip himself bare. This was the further
impossible to him, because of a belief he now imposed upon himself, to
cover the cowardly shrinking from so extreme a penitential act, that
such confessions are due from men to the priest only, and that he could
confess wholly and absolutely to the priest--to heaven, therefore, under
seal, and in safety, but with perfect repentance.

So, compelled to keep his inner self unknown, he fronted Chillon;
courteously, in the somewhat lofty seeming of a guarded manner, he
requested audience for a few minutes; observing the princely figure of
the once hated man, and understanding Henrietta's sheer womanly choice
of him; Carinthia's idolatry, too, as soon as he had spoken. The man was
in his voice.

Chillon said: 'It concerns my sister, I have to think. In that case, her
wish is to be present. Your lordship will shorten the number of minutes
for the interview by permitting it.'

Fleetwood encountered Carinthia's eyes. They did not entreat or defy.
They seconded her brother, and were a civil shining naught on her
husband. He bowed his head, constrained, feeling heavily the two to one.

She replied to the look: 'My brother and I have a single mind. We save
time by speaking three together, my lord.'

He was led into the long room of the workshop, where various patterns of
muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords were stars, crosses, wedges, over
the walls, and a varnished wooden model of a piece of cannon occupied
the middle place, on a block.

Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war were common
on those days among a people beginning to sit with habitual snugness
at the festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers.
Fleetwood had not been on the side of the banqueting citizens, though
his country's journals and her feasted popular wits made a powerful
current to whelm opposition. But the appearance of the woman, his wife,
here, her head surrounded by destructive engines in the form of trophy,
and the kno