At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said: 'He did send a message:
I gathered it--without the words--from our Uncle Griphard. I thought him
in honour bound to you--and it suited me that I should.'

'I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,'
said Carinthia. 'That was my treachery to the love of my brother.. I
dream of father and mother reproaching me.'

The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind's picture of the
early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and
the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again,
as no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with
him from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and
Spanish Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment
for having abandoned a sister's duties in the quest of personal
happiness.

But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind's intelligence,
wherein was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her
to gather more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man
stripped of his terrors. She penetrated the discrowned tyrant's nature
some distance, deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms. These,
combined with his assured high style, had woven him the magical coat,
threadbare to quiet scrutiny. She matched him beside her brother. The
dwarfed object was then observed; and it was not for a woman to measure
herself beside him. She came, however, of a powerful blood, and he was
pressing her back on her resources: without the measurement or a thought
of it, she did that which is the most ordinary and the least noticed of
our daily acts in civilized intercourse, she subjected him to the trial
of the elements composing him, by collision with what she felt of her
own; and it was because she felt them strongly, aware of her feeling
them, but unaware of any conflict, that the wrestle occurred. She flung
him, pitied him, and passed on along her path elsewhere. This can be
done when love is gone. It is done more or less at any meeting of
men and men; and men and women who love not are perpetually doing it,
unconsciously or sensibly. Even in their love, a time for the trial
arrives among certain of them; and the leadership is assumed, and
submission ensues, tacitly; nothing of the contention being spoken,
perhaps, nothing definitely known.

In Carinthia's case, her revived enthusiasm for her brother drove to