effort; she crossed them
like the mountain maid over a gorge's plank--kept her tones perfectly.
Her Madge and Mr. Gower Woodseer made a conversible topic. She was
inquisitive for accounts of Spanish history and the land of Spain.

They passed into the drawing-room. She had heard of the fate of the poor
child in Wales, she said, without a comment.

'I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal,' he confessed, and was
near on shivering. She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.

Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to it.
She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada. Her
curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the
Pyrenees.

'Hardly the place for you; there's a perpetual heaving of Carlism in
those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers,' he remarked; and
for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a
flowing thought.

He remarked the come and go of it.

He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish
Pyrenees.

Books helped her at present, she said.

Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her
uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower
Woodseer's conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the rascal
Ines.

To which her unreproachful answer, 'You made use of those men, my lord,'
sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre's words, as to the grip
men progressively are held in by their deeds done.

'Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life,' he said, thinking
she might set her considerations on other points of his character. But
this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his particular
estimate of his character, and he spurned it: an act of pride that drove
his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily became an
embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the woman he called
wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who can be idealized by
virtue of their being known. For the young man embracing a character
loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself and passes into it, to
see the creature he is with the other's eyes, and feel for the other as a
very self. Such is the privilege and the chastisement of the young.

Gower Woodseer's engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject for
expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on Gower, and
where sh