edded: the dedicated ascetic
contemplated a hooded shape, washed of every earthly fleck. It proved
how men may by power of grip squeeze raptures out of pain.

CHAPTER XLV. CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND
WHAT HAPPENED

The Dame is at her thumps for attention to be called to 'the strangeness
of it,' that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet,
on the most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land,
should at this period become 'the cynosure of a city beautifully named
by the poet Great Augusta, and truly indeed the world's metropolis.'

Put aside her artful pother to rouse excitement at stages of a
narrative, London's general eye upon little Croridge was but another
instance of the extraordinary and not so wonderful. Lady Arpington,
equal to a Parliament in herself, spoke of the place and the countess
courted by her repentant lord. Brailstone and Chumley Potts were town
criers of the executioner letter each had received from the earl; Potts
with his chatter of a suicide's pistol kept loaded in a case under
a two-inch-long silver Cross, and with sundry dramatic taps on the
forehead, Jottings over the breast, and awful grimace of devoutness.
There was no mistaking him. The young nobleman of the millions was
watched; the town spyglass had him in its orbit. Tales of the ancestral
Fleetwoods ran beside rumours of a Papist priest at the bedside of the
Foredoomed to Error's dying mother. His wealth was counted, multiplied
by the ready naughts of those who know little and dread much. Sir Meeson
Corby referred to an argument Lord Fleetwood had held on an occasion
hotly against the logical consistency of the Protestant faith; and to
his alarm lest some day 'all that immense amount of money should slip
away from us to favour the machinations of Roman Catholicism!' The
Countess of Cressett, Livia, anticipated her no surprise at anything
Lord Fleetwood might do: she knew him.

So thereupon, with the whirr of a covey on wing before the fowler, our
crested three of immemorial antiquity and a presumptive immortality,
the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, shot up again, hooting across the
dormant chief city Old England's fell word of the scarlet shimmer above
the nether pit-flames, Rome. An ancient horror in the blood of the
population, conceiving the word to signify, beak, fang, and claw, the
fiendish ancient enemy of the roasting day of yore, heard and echoed.
Sleepless a