“Some day I will write my memoirs,” he said to himself, as he sat down.

Claudius was in a frame of mind which he would have found it hard to describe.  The long conversation with Mr. Bellingham had been the first intimation he had received of Margaret’s disaster, and the same interview had decided him to act at once in her behalf—­in other words, to return to Europe immediately, after a week’s stay in New York, leaving behind all that was most dear to him.  This resolution had formed itself instantaneously in his mind, and it never occurred to him, either then or later, that he could have done anything else in the world.  It certainly did not occur to him that he was doing anything especially praiseworthy in sacrificing his love to its object, in leaving Margaret for a couple of months, and enduring all that such a separation meant, in order to serve her interests more effectually.  He knew well enough what he was undertaking—­the sleepless nights, the endless days, the soul-compelling heaviness of solitude, and the deadly sinking at the heart, all which he should endure daily for sixty days—­he could not be back before that.  He knew it all, for he had suffered it all, during those four and twenty hours on the yacht that followed his first wild speech of love.  But Claudius’s was a knightly soul, and when he served he served wholly, without reservation.  Had the dark-browed Countess guessed half the nobleness of purpose her tall lover carried in his breast, who knows but she might have been sooner moved herself.  But how could she know?  She suspected, indeed, that he was above his fellows, and she never attributed bad motives to his actions, as she would unhesitatingly have done with most men; for she had learned lessons of caution in her life.  Who steals hearts steals souls, wherefore it behoves woman to look that the lock be strong and the key hung high.  Claudius thought so too, and he showed it in every action, though unconsciously enough, for it was a knowledge natural and not acquired, an instinctive determination to honour where honour was due.  Call it Quixotism if need be.  There is nothing ridiculous in the word, for there breathes no truer knight or gentler soul than Cervantes’s hero in all the pages of history or romance.  Why cannot all men see it?  Why must an infamous world be ever sneering at the sight, and smacking its filthy lips over some fresh gorge of martyrs?  Society has non-suited hell to-day, lest peradventure it should not sleep o’ nights.

Thomas Carlyle, late of Chelsea, knew that.  How he hit and hammered and churned in his wrath, with his great cast-iron words.  How the world shrieked when he wound his tenacious fingers in the glory of her golden hair and twisted and wrenched and twisted till she yelled for mercy, promising to be good, like a whipped child.  There is a story told of him which might be true.

It was at a dinner-party, and Carlyle sat silent, listening to the talk of lesser men, the snow on his hair and the fire in his amber eyes.  A young Liberal was talking theory to a beefy old Conservative, who despised youth and reason in an equal degree.