He called on his upholsterer and heard news to please her.  The house hired for a month above Great Marlow was ready; her ladyship could enter it to-morrow.  It pleased my lord to think that she might do so, and not bother him any more about the presentation at Court during the current year.  In spite of certain overtures from the military authorities, and roused eulogistic citations of his name in the newspapers and magazines, he was not on friendly terms with his country yet, having contracted the fatal habit of irony, which, whether hitting or musing its object, stirs old venom in our wound, twitches the feelings.  Unfortunately for him, they had not adequate expression unless he raged within; so he had to shake up wrath over his grievances, that he might be satisfactorily delivered; and he was judged irreconcilable when he had subsided into the quietest contempt, from the prospective seat of a country estate, in the society of a young wife who adored him.

An exile from the sepulchre of that house void of the consecration of ashes, he walked the streets and became reconciled to street sunlight.  There were no carriage accidents to disturb him with apprehensions.  Besides, the slowness of the postillion Joshua Abnett, which probably helped to the delay, was warrant of his sureness.  And in an accident the stringy fellow, young Weyburn, could be trusted for giving his attention to the ladies—­especially to the younger of the two, taking him for the man his elders were at his age.  As for Pagnell, a Providence watches over the Pagnells!  Mortals have no business to interfere.

An accident on water would be a frolic to his girl.  Swimming was a gift she had from nature.  Pagnell vowed she swam out a mile at Dover when she was twelve.  He had seen her in blue water:  he had seen her readiness to jump to the rescue once when a market-woman, stepping out of a boat to his yacht on the Tabus, plumped in.  She had the two kinds of courage—­the impulsive and the reasoned.  What is life to man or woman if we are not to live it honourably?  Men worthy of the name say this.  The woman who says and acts on it is—­well, she is fit company for them.  But only the woman of natural courage can say it and act on it.

Would she come by Winchester, or choose the lower road by Salisbury and Southampton, to smell the sea? perhaps-like her!—­dismissing the chariot and hiring a yacht for a voyage round the coast and up the Thames.  She had an extraordinary love of the sea, yet she preferred soldiers to sailors.  A woman?  Never one of them more a woman!  But it came of her quickness to take the colour and share the tastes of the man to whom she gave herself.

My lord was beginning to distinguish qualities in a character.

He was informed at the mews that Joshua Abnett was on the road still.  Joshua seemed to be a roadster of uncommon unprogressiveness, proper to a framed picture.

While debating whether to lunch at his loathed club or at a home loathed more, but open to bright enlivenment any instant, Lord Ormont beheld a hat lifted and Captain May saluting him.  They were near a famous gambling-house in St. James’s Street.