Chillon looked over his shoulder.  ’He’s there still; he’s fond of solitude.  And, Carin, my dear, don’t give your hand when you are meeting or parting with people it’s not done.’

His uninstructed sister said:  ‘Did you not like him?’

She was answered with an ‘Oh,’ the tone of which balanced lightly on the neutral line.  ’Some of the ideas he has are Lord Fleetwood’s, I hear, and one can understand them in a man of enormous wealth, who doesn’t know what to do with himself and is dead-sick of flattery; though it seems odd for an English nobleman to be raving about Nature.  Perhaps it’s because none else of them does.’

‘Lord Fleetwood loves our mountains, Chillon?’

’But a fellow who probably has to make his way in the world!—­and he despises ambition!’ . . .  Chillon dropped him.  He was antipathetic to eccentrics, and his soldierly and social training opposed the profession of heterodox ideas:  to have listened seriously to them coming from the mouth of an unambitious bootmaker’s son involved him in the absurdity.  He considered that there was no harm in the lad, rather a commendable sort of courage and some notion of manners; allowing for his ignorance of the convenable in putting out his hand to take a young lady’s, with the plea of thanking her.  He hoped she would be more on her guard.

Carinthia was sure she had the name of the nobleman wishing to bestow his title upon the beautiful Henrietta.  Lord Fleetwood!  That slender thread given her of the character of her brother’s rival who loved the mountains was woven in her mind with her passing experience of the youth they had left behind them, until the two became one, a highly transfigured one, and the mountain scenery made him very threatening to her brother.  A silky haired youth, brown-eyed, unconquerable in adversity, immensely rich, fond of solitude, curled, decorated, bejewelled by all the elves and gnomes of inmost solitude, must have marvellous attractions, she feared.  She thought of him so much, that her humble spirit conceived the stricken soul of the woman as of necessity the pursuer; as shamelessly, though timidly, as she herself pursued in imagination the enchanted secret of the mountain-land.  She hoped her brother would not supplicate, for it struck her that the lover who besieged the lady would forfeit her roaming and hunting fancy.

‘I wonder what that gentleman is doing now,’ she said to Chillon.

He grimaced slightly, for her sake; he would have liked to inform her, for the sake of educating her in the customs of the world she was going to enter, that the word ‘gentleman’ conveys in English a special signification.

Her expression of wonder whether they were to meet him again gave Chillon the opportunity of saying: 

’It ‘s the unlikeliest thing possible—­at all events in England.’

‘But I think we shall,’ said she.

‘My dear, you meet people of your own class; you don’t meet others.’