ou have not yet your strength to come on with us?'
He thought he would stay some time longer: he had a disposition to smoke.
She tripped away to her brother and was watched through the whiffs of a
pipe far up the valley, guiltless of any consciousness of producing an
impression. But her mind was with the stranger sufficiently to cause her
to say to Chillon, at the close of a dispute between him and Anton on the
interesting subject of the growth of the horns of chamois: 'Have we been
quite kind to that gentleman?'
Chillon looked over his shoulder. 'He's there still; he's fond of
solitude. And, Carin, my dear, don't give your hand when you are meeting
or parting with people it's not done.'
His uninstructed sister said: 'Did you not like him?'
She was answered with an 'Oh,' the tone of which balanced lightly on the
neutral line. 'Some of the ideas he has are Lord Fleetwood's, I hear, and
one can understand them in a man of enormous wealth, who doesn't know
what to do with himself and is dead-sick of flattery; though it seems odd
for an English nobleman to be raving about Nature. Perhaps it's because
none else of them does.'
'Lord Fleetwood loves our mountains, Chillon?'
'But a fellow who probably has to make his way in the world!--and he
despises ambition!' . . . Chillon dropped him. He was antipathetic to
eccentrics, and his soldierly and social training opposed the profession
of heterodox ideas: to have listened seriously to them coming from the
mouth of an unambitious bootmaker's son involved him in the absurdity. He
considered that there was no harm in the lad, rather a commendable sort
of courage and some notion of manners; allowing for his ignorance of the
convenable in putting out his hand to take a young lady's, with the plea
of thanking her. He hoped she would be more on her guard.
Carinthia was sure she had the name of the nobleman wishing to bestow his
title upon the beautiful Henrietta. Lord Fleetwood! That slender thread
given her of the character of her brother's rival who loved the mountains
was woven in her mind with her passing experience of the youth they had
left behind them, until the two became one, a highly transfigured one,
and the mountain scenery made him very threatening to her brother. A
silky haired youth, brown-eyed, unconquerable in adversity, immensely
rich, fond of solitude, curled, decorated, bejewelled by all the elves
and gnomes of inmost solitude, must have marvellous attr
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