language moved him to proud hostility: but the
speaker was Carinthia's brother.

He said to her: 'You won't forget Gower and Madge?'

She gave him a smile in saying: 'It shall be settled for a day after next
week.'

The forms of courtesy were exchanged.

At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said: 'He did send a message:
I gathered it--without the words--from our Uncle Griphard. I thought him
in honour bound to you--and it suited me that I should.'

'I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,'
said Carinthia. 'That was my treachery to the love of my brother. . I
dream of father and mother reproaching me.'

The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind's picture of the
early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and
the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again, as
no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with him
from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and Spanish
Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment for
having abandoned a sister's duties in the quest of personal happiness.

But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind's intelligence, wherein
was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her to gather
more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man stripped of
his terrors. She penetrated the discrowned tyrant's nature some distance,
deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms. These, combined with his
assured high style, had woven him the magical coat, threadbare to quiet
scrutiny. She matched him beside her brother. The dwarfed object was then
observed; and it was not for a woman to measure herself beside him. She
came, however, of a powerful blood, and he was pressing her back on her
resources: without the measurement or a thought of it, she did that which
is the most ordinary and the least noticed of our daily acts in civilized
intercourse, she subjected him to the trial of the elements composing
him, by collision with what she felt of her own; and it was because she
felt them strongly, aware of her feeling them, but unaware of any
conflict, that the wrestle occurred. She flung him, pitied him, and
passed on along her path elsewhere. This can be done when love is gone.
It is done more or less at any meeting of men and men; and men and women
who love not are perpetually doing it, unconsciously or sensibly. Even in
their love,