prescribe your company. Only be merciful. Exclusion
will mean death to some. Columelli will be touring in Switzerland. You
shall have him in the house when my new bit of ground Northwest of London
is open: very handy, ten miles out. We'll have the Opera troupe there,
and you shall command the Opera.'

Her beauty sweetened to thank him.

If, as Livia said, his passion for her was unchanged, the generosity
manifested in the considerate screen it wore over any physical betrayal
of it, deserved the lustre of her eyes. It dwelt a moment, vivid with the
heart close behind and remorseful for misreading of old his fine
character. Here was a young man who could be the very kindest of friends
to the woman rejecting him to wed another. Her smile wavered. How shall a
loving wife express warmth of sentiment elsewhere, without the one beam
too much, that plunges her on a tideway? His claim of nothing called for
everything short of the proscribed. She gave him her beauty in fullest
flower.

It had the appearance of a temptation; and he was not tempted, though he
admired; his thought being, Husband of the thing!

But he admired. That condition awakened his unsatisfied past days to
desire positive proof of her worthlessness. The past days writhed in him.
The present were loveless, entirely cold. He had not even the wish to
press her hand. The market held beautiful women of a like description. He
wished simply to see her proved the thing he read her to be: and not
proved as such by himself. He was unable to summon or imagine emotion
enough for him to simulate the forms by which fair women are wooed to
their perdition. For all he cared, any man on earth might try, succeed or
fail, as long as he had visual assurance that she coveted, a slave to the
pleasures commanded by the wealth once disdained by her. Till that time,
he could not feel himself perfectly free.

Dame Gossip prefers to ejaculate. Young men are mysteries! and bowl us
onward. No one ever did comprehend the Earl of Fleetwood, she says: he
was bad, he was good; he was whimsical and stedfast; a splendid figure, a
mark for ridicule; romantic and a close arithmetician; often a devil,
sometimes the humanest of creatures.

In fine, he was a millionaire nobleman, owning to a considerable infusion
of Welsh blood in the composition of him. Now, to the Cymry and to the
pure Kelt, the past is at their elbows continually. The past of their
lives has lost neither face nor voice behi