saw his state; she let him learn that she alone on earth understood him.  The consequence was that he was forthwith enrolled in her train.  It soothed him to be near a woman.  Did she venture her guess as to the cause of his conduct, she blotted it out with a facility women have, and cast on it a melancholy hue he was taught to participate in.  She spoke of sorrows, personal sorrows, much as he might speak of his—­vaguely, and with self-blame.  And she understood him.  How the dark unfathomed wealth within us gleams to a woman’s eye!  We are at compound interest immediately:  so much richer than we knew!—­almost as rich as we dreamed!  But then the instant we are away from her we find ourselves bankrupt, beggared.  How is that?  We do not ask.  We hurry to her and bask hungrily in her orbs.  The eye must be feminine to be thus creative:  I cannot say why.  Lady Judith understood Richard, and he feeling infinitely vile, somehow held to her more feverishly, as one who dreaded the worst in missing her.  The spirit must rest; he was weak with what he suffered.

Austin found them among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland:  Titans, male and female, who had not displaced Jove, and were now adrift, prone on floods of sentiment.  The blue-flocked peasant swinging behind his oxen of a morning, the gaily-kerchiefed fruit-woman, the jackass-driver, even the doctor of those regions, have done more for their fellows.  Horrible reflection!  Lady Judith is serene above it, but it frets at Richard when he is out of her shadow.  Often wretchedly he watches the young men of his own age trooping to their work.  Not cloud-work theirs!  Work solid, unambitious, fruitful!

Lady Judith had a nobler in prospect for the hero.  He gaped blindfolded for anything, and she gave him the map of Europe in tatters.  He swallowed it comfortably.  It was an intoxicating cordial.  Himself on horseback overriding wrecks of Empires!  Well might common sense cower with the meaner animals at the picture.  Tacitly they agreed to recast the civilized globe.  The quality of vapour is to melt and shape itself anew; but it is never the quality of vapour to reassume the same shapes.  Briareus of the hundred unoccupied hands may turn to a monstrous donkey with his hind legs aloft, or twenty thousand jabbering apes.  The phantasmic groupings of the young brain are very like those we see in the skies, and equally the sport of the wind.  Lady Judith blew.  There was plenty of vapour in him, and it always resolved into some shape or other.  You that mark those clouds of eventide, and know youth, will see the similitude:  it will not be strange, it will barely seem foolish to you, that a young man of Richard’s age, Richard’s education and position, should be in this wild state.  Had he not been nursed to believe he was born for great things?  Did she not say she was sure of it?  And to feel base, yet born for better, is enough to make one grasp at anything cloudy.  Suppose the hero with a game