al ignorance of causes. His wretchedness was due now to the fact that
the aforetime huntress refused to be captured. He took a silver cross
from a table-drawer and laid it on the pistol-case. 'There, Chummy,' he
said; that was all; not sermonizing or proselytizing. He was partly
comprehended by Chumley Potts, fully a week later. The unsuspecting
fellow, soon to be despatched in the suite of Brailstone, bore away an
unwontedly affectionate dismissal to his bed, and spoke some rather
squeamish words himself, as he recollected with disgust when he ran about
over London repeating his executioner's.

The Cross on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood's
thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners
must have their immediate termination. These old friends were the
plague-infected clothes he flung off his body. But the Cross where it
lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to
decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand
he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his
belief in the Eternal would pay. Henrietta had mentioned her husband's
defeat, by some dastardly contrivance. He had to communicate, for the
disburdening of his soul, not only that he was guilty, but the meanest of
criminals, in being no more than half guilty. His training told him of
the contempt women entertain toward the midway or cripple sinner, when
they have no special desire to think him innocent. How write, or even how
phrase his having merely breathed in his ruffian's hearing the wish that
he might hear of her husband's defeat! And with what object? Here, too, a
woman might, years hence, if not forgive, bend her head resignedly over
the man's vile nature, supposing strong passion his motive. But the name
for the actual motive? It would not bear writing, or any phrasing round
it. An unsceptred despot bidden take a fair woman's eyes into his breast,
saw and shrank. And now the eyes were Carinthia's: he saw a savage
bridegroom, and a black ladder-climber, and the sweetest of pardoning
brides, and the devil in him still insatiate for revenge upon her who
held him to his word.

He wrote, read, tore the page, trimmed the lamp, and wrote again. He
remembered Gower Woodseer's having warned him he would finish his career
a monk. Not, like Feltre, an oily convert, but under the hood, yes, and
extracting a chartreuse from his ramble through woods ric