izing. He
was partly comprehended by Chumley Potts, fully a week later. The
unsuspecting fellow, soon to be despatched in the suite of Brailstone,
bore away an unwontedly affectionate dismissal to his bed, and spoke
some rather squeamish words himself, as he recollected with disgust when
he ran about over London repeating his executioner's.

The Cross on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood's
thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners
must have their immediate termination. These old friends were the
plague-infected clothes he flung off his body. But the Cross where it
lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to
decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand
he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his
belief in the Eternal would pay. Henrietta had mentioned her husband's
defeat, by some dastardly contrivance. He had to communicate, for the
disburdening of his soul, not only that he was guilty, but the meanest
of criminals, in being no more than half guilty. His training told him
of the contempt women entertain toward the midway or cripple sinner,
when they have no special desire to think him innocent. How write, or
even how phrase his having merely breathed in his ruffian's hearing the
wish that he might hear of her husband's defeat! And with what object?
Here, too, a woman might, years hence, if not forgive, bend her head
resignedly over the man's vile nature, supposing strong passion his
motive. But the name for the actual motive? It would not bear writing,
or any phrasing round it. An unsceptred despot bidden take a fair
woman's eyes into his breast, saw and shrank. And now the eyes were
Carinthia's: he saw a savage bridegroom, and a black ladder-climber, and
the sweetest of pardoning brides, and the devil in him still insatiate
for revenge upon her who held him to his word.

He wrote, read, tore the page, trimmed the lamp, and wrote again. He
remembered Gower Woodseer's having warned him he would finish his career
a monk. Not, like Feltre, an oily convert, but under the hood, yes, and
extracting a chartreuse from his ramble through woods richer far than
the philosopher's milk of Mother Nature's bosom. There flamed the
burning signal of release from his torments; there his absolving refuge,
instead of his writing fruitless, intricate, impossible stuff to a
woman. The letter was renounced and shr