A sketch to her of Rowsley’s deep love. . . .  Lady Charlotte wandered into an amazement at it.  A sentence of her brother’s recent speaking danced in her recollection.  He said of his country:  That Lout comes to a knowledge of his wants too late.  True, Old England is always louting to the rear, and has to be pricked in the rear and pulled by the neck before she ’s equal to the circumstances around her.  But what if his words were flung at him in turn!  Short of ‘Lout,’ it rang correctly.  ‘Too late,’ we hope to clip from the end of the sentence likewise.  We have then, if you stress it—­’comes to a knowledge of his wants;—­a fair example of the creatures men are; the greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss of the woman—­or a fear of the loss—­how much they really do love her.

Well, and she may learn the same or something sufficiently like it, if she ’s caught in time, called to her face, Countess of Ormont, sister-in-law, and smoothed, petted, made believe she ’s now understood and won’t be questioned on a single particular—­in fact, she marches back in a sort of triumph; and all the past in a cupboard, locked up, without further inquiry.

Her brother Rowsley’s revealed human appearance of the stricken man —­stricken right into his big heart—­precipitated Lady Charlotte’s reflections and urged her to an unavailing fever of haste during the circuitous drive in moonlight to the port.  She alighted at the principal inn, and was there informed that the packetboat, with a favouring breeze and tide, had started ten minutes earlier.  She summoned the landlord, and described a lady, as probably one of the passengers:  ’Dark, holds herself up high.  Some such lady had dined at the inn on tea, and gone aboard the boat soon after.

Lady Charlotte burned with the question:  Alone?  She repressed her feminine hunger and asked to see the book of visitors.  But the lady had not slept at the inn, so had not been requested to write her name.

The track of the vessel could be seen from the pier, on the line of a bar of moonlight; and thinking, that the abominable woman, if aboard she was, had coolly provided herself with a continental passport—­or had it done for two by her accomplice, that Weyburn, before she left London—­Lady Charlotte sent a loathing gaze at the black figure of the boat on the water, untroubled by any reminder of her share in the conspiracy of events, which was to be her brother’s chastisement to his end.

Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures, whom they round and sap and pierce in caverns, having them on all sides, and striking deep inward at moments.  There is no resisting the years, if we have a heart, and a common understanding.  They constitute, in the sum of them, the self-examination, whence issues, acknowledged or not, a belated self-knowledge, to direct our final actions.  She had the heart.  Sight of the high-minded, proud, speechless man suffering