be.  She, when barely more than a child (a girl of sixteen), had followed him over the then luckless Italian fields—­sacrificing as much for a cause that she held to be trivial, as he in the ardour of his half-fanatical worship.  Her theory was:  “These Italians are in bondage, and since heaven permits it, there has been guilt.  By endurance they are strengthened, by suffering chastened; so let them endure and suffer.”  She would cleave to this view with many variations of pity.  Merthyr’s experience was tolerant to the weaker vessel’s young delight in power, which makes her sometimes, though sweet and merciful by nature, enunciate Hebraic severities oracularly.  He smiled, and was never weary of pointing out practical refutations.  Whereat she said, “Will a thousand instances change the principle?” When the brain, and especially the fine brain of a woman, first begins to act for itself, the work is of heavy labour; she finds herself plunging abroad on infinite seas, and runs speedily into the anchorage of dogmas, obfuscatory saws, and what she calls principles.  Here she is safe; but if her thinking was not originally the mere action of lively blood upon that battery of intelligence, she will by-and-by reflect that it is not well for a live thing to be tied to a dead, and that long clinging to safety confesses too much.  Merthyr waited for Georgians patiently.  On all other points they were heart-in-heart.  It was her pride to say that she loved him with no sense of jealousy, and prayed that he might find a woman, in plain words, worthy of him.  This woman had not been found; she confessed that she had never seen her.

Georgians received Captain Gambier’s communication in Monmouth.  Merthyr had now and then written of a Miss Belloni; but he had seemed to refer to a sort of child, and Georgians had looked on her as another Italian pensioner.  She was decisive.  The moment she awoke to feel herself brooding over the thought of this girl, she started to join Merthyr.  Solitude is pasturage for a suspicion.  On her way she grew persuaded that her object was bad, and stopped; until the thought came, ’If he is in a dilemma, who shall help him save his sister?’ And, with spiritually streaming eyes at a vision of companionship broken (but whether by his taking another adviser, or by Miss Belloni, she did not ask), Georgiana continued her journey.

At the door of Lady Gosstre’s town-house she hesitated, and said in her mind, “What am I doing? and what earthliness has come into my love for him?”

Or, turning to the cry, “Will he want me?” stung herself.  Conscious that there was some poison in her love, but clinging to it not less, she entered the house, and was soon in Merthyr’s arms.

“Why have you come up?” he asked.

“Were you thinking of coming to me quickly?” she murmured in reply.

He did not say yes, but that he had business in London.  Nor did he say what.

Georgiana let him go.