ve sense of fairness and vexed him with
his cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common
man, and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly. Just as
her father would have--treated the matter, she said: 'Are we sorry for
what has happened, Chillon?' The man had gone, the injustice was done;
the master was left to reflect on the part played by his inheritance of
the half share of ninety thousand pounds in his proper respect for Lord
Levellier's memory. Harsh to an inferior is a horrible charge. But the
position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance. Knowing
a part of Lord Fleetwood's message to Lord Levellier suppressed, the
bride's brother, her chief guardian, had treated the omission as of no
importance, and had all the while understood that he ought to give her
his full guess at the reading of it: or so his racked mind understood
it now. His old father had said: A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar; and,
Lies are usurers' coin we pay for ten thousand per cent. His harshness
in the past hour to a workman who had suffered with him and had not
intended serious mischief was Chillon's unsounded motive for the
resolution to be out of debt to the man he loathed. There is a Muse that
smiles aloft surveying our acts from the well-springs.

Carinthia heard her brother's fuller version of the earl's communication
to her uncle before the wild day of her marriage. 'Not particularly
fitted for the married state,' Chillon phrased it, saying: 'He seems to
have known himself, he was honest so far.' She was advised to think it
over, that the man was her husband.

She had her brother's heart in her breast, she could not misread him.
She thought it over, and felt a slight drag of compassion for the
reluctant bridegroom. That was a stretch long leagues distant from love
with her; the sort of feeling one has for strange animals hurt and she
had in her childish blindness done him a hurt, and he had bitten her. He
was a weak young nobleman; he had wealth for a likeness of strength; he
had no glory about his head. Why had he not chosen a woman to sit
beside him who would have fancied his coronet a glory and his luxury a
kindness? But the poor young nobleman did not choose! The sadly comic of
his keeping to the pledge of his word--his real wife--the tyrant of the
tyrant--clothed him; the vision of him at the altar, and on the coach,
and at the Royal Sovereign Inn, and into the dimness where a p