Sentiment you do not obtain from a Damascus blade.  She most cordially despised the ladies who parade and play on their sex, and are for ever acting according to the feminine standard:—­a dangerous stretch of contempt for one less strong than she.

Riding behind her and Temple one day with the princess, I said, ’What takes you most in Janet?’

She replied, ’Her courage.  And it is of a kind that may knot up every other virtue worth having.  I have impulses, and am capable of desperation, but I have no true courage:  so I envy and admire, even if I have to blame her; for I know that this possession of hers, which identifies her and marks her from the rest of us, would bear the ordeal of fire.  I can imagine the qualities I have most pride in withering and decaying under a prolonged trial.  I cannot conceive her courage failing.  Perhaps because I have it not myself I think it the rarest of precious gifts.  It seems to me to imply one half, and to dispense with the other.’

I have lived to think that Ottilia was right.  As nearly right, too, in the wording of her opinion as one may be in three or four sentences designed to be comprehensive.

My Janet’s readiness to meet calamity was shown ere we reached home upon an evening of the late autumn, and set eye on a scene, for her the very saddest that could have been devised to test her spirit of endurance, when, driving up the higher heath-land, we saw the dark sky ominously reddened over Riversley, and, mounting the ridge, had the funeral flames of the old Grange dashed in our faces.  The blow was evil, sudden, unaccountable.  Villagers, tenants, farm-labourers, groups of a deputation that had gone to the railway station to give us welcome; and returned, owing to a delay in our arrival, stood gazing from all quarters.  The Grange was burning in two great wings, that soared in flame-tips and columns of crimson smoke, leaving the central hall and chambers untouched as yet, but alive inside with mysterious ranges of lights, now curtained, now made bare—­a feeble contrast to the savage blaze to right and left, save for the wonder aroused as to its significance.  These were soon cloaked.  Dead sable reigned in them, and at once a jet of flame gave the whole vast building to destruction.  My wife thrust her hand in mine.  Fire at the heart, fire at the wings—­our old home stood in that majesty of horror which freezes the limbs of men, bidding them look and no more.

‘What has Riversley done to deserve this?’ I heard Janet murmur to herself.  ‘His room !’ she said, when at the South-east wing, where my old grandfather had slept, there burst a glut of flame.  We dove down to the park and along the carriage-road to the first red line of gazers.  They told us that no living creatures were in the house.  My aunt Dorothy was at Bulsted.  I perceived my father’s man Tollingby among the servants, and called him to me; others came, and out of a clatter