He had to confess his having lost some bits of himself by reason of his meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let it continue a space, will show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to physical trials of strength and skill.  It will show likewise in the brain beating broken wings—­inability to shoot a thought up out of the body for half a minute.  And, good Lord! how quickly the tight-strong fellow crumbles, when once the fragmentary disintegration has begun!  Weyburn cried out on a heart that bounded off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped with reminders of the place of good leader he was for taking among the young.  Hang superexcellence! but we know those moanings over the troubles of a married woman; we know their sources, know their goal, or else we are the fiction-puppet or the Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married at the British Embassy, Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks’ acquaintance with her husband, who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly in the registrar’s book, but does not prove himself much the hero when he drives a pen, even for so little as the signing of his name!  He signed his name, apparently not more than partly pledging himself to the bond.  Lord Ormont’s autobiographical scraps combined with Lady Charlotte’s hints and Mrs. Pagnell’s communications, to provoke the secretary’s literary contempt of his behaviour to his wife.  However, the former might be mended, and he resumed the task.

It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position.  Things constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively bobbings when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with Weyburn, until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away in the society of the steadiest.

He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would best be able—­probably it was the one way—­to keep himself together; and his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight.  For if one is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and enters us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has us as a foe.  The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an intimate knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within.  Safest for him, after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant person he was, both there and anywhere else.  The Countess of Ormont’s manner toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he should follow; and he thanked her.  He could not quite so sincerely thank her aunt.  His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to him sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account of services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.