es had gone from them, whether of
anger or suffering. Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated
ground: and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping to
lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until
priestly intercession availed. So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull
consciences can! But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her
injury, should be perfectly civil. She is a woman without emotion. She is
a woman full of emotion, one man knows. She ties him to her, to make him
feel the lash of his remorse. He feels it because of her casting him from
her--and so civilly. If this were a Catholic church, one might go in and
give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing. As it is, here are the
graves; the dead everywhere have their sanctity, even the heathen.

Fleetwood read the name of the family of Meek on several boards at the
head of the graves. Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five. A
female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life. Ezra Meek gave up the
ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one. A healthy spot,
Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected, and had
a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an acknowledgement
of a desire for the warm smell of incense.

CHAPTER XLIII

ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE

His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the
stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont up
again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist
earthiness of the air off the ironstone. He rode fasting, a good
preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the Great
Nourisher's teats to her young. The earl was relieved of his dejection by
a sudden filling of his nostrils. Fat Esslemont underneath had no such
air. Except on the mornings of his walk over the Salzkammergut and Black
Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn that deep breath of the
satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast with thankfulness. Huntsmen
would know it, if the chase were not urgent to pull them at the tail of
the running beast. Once or twice on board his yacht he might have known
something like it, but the salt sea-breeze could not be disconnected from
his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought of Feltre swung vapour of
incense all about him. Breathing this air of the young sun's kiss of
earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions of the burnt Orienta