is paramount.  She has not said a syllable in depreciation of you.  That is to her credit.  She also admits that I must yield freely if at all, and she grants me the use of similes; but her tactics are to contest them one by one, and the admirable pretender is not as shifty as the mariner’s breeze, he is not like the wandering spark in burnt paper, of which you cannot say whether it is chasing or chased:  it is I who am the shifty Pole to the steadiest of magnets.  She is a princess in other things besides her superiority to Physics.  There will be wild scenes at Baden.

’My Diary of to-day is all bestowed on you.  What have I to write in it except the pair of commas under the last line of yesterday—­” He has not come!” Oh! to be caring for a he.

’O that I were with your sister now, on one side of her idol, to correct her extravagant idolatry!  I long for her.  I had a number of nice little phrases to pet her with.

’You have said (I have it written) that men who are liked by men are the best friends for women.  In which case, the earl should be worthy of our friendship; he is liked.  Captain Abrane and Sir Meeson, in spite of the hard service he imposes on them with such comical haughtiness, incline to speak well of him, and Methuen Rivers—­here for two days on his way to his embassy at Vienna—­assured us he is the rarest of gentlemen on the point of honour of his word.  They have stories of him, to confirm Livia’s eulogies, showing him punctilious to chivalry:  No man alive is like him in that, they say.  He grieves me.  All that you have to fear is my pity for one so sensitive.  So speed, sir!  It is not good for us to be much alone, and I am alone when you are absent.

’I hear military music!

’How grand that music makes the dullest world appear in a minute.  There is a magic in it to bring you to me from the most dreadful of distances.  —­Chillon! it would kill me!—­Writing here and you perhaps behind the hill, I can hardly bear it;—­I am torn away, my hand will not any more.  This music burst out to mock me!  Adieu.

’I am yours.

’Your Henrietta.

‘A kiss to the sister.  It is owing to her.’

Carinthia kissed the letter on that last line.  It seemed to her to end in a celestial shower.

She was oppressed by wonder of the writer who could run like the rill of the mountains in written speech; and her recollection of the contents perpetually hurried to the close, which was more in her way of writing, for there the brief sentences had a throb beneath them.

She did not speak of the letter to her brother when she returned it.  A night in the carriage, against his shoulder, was her happy prospect, in the thought that she would be with her dearest all night, touching him asleep, and in the sweet sense of being near to the beloved of the fairest angel of her sex.  They pursued their journey soon after Anton was dismissed with warm shakes of the hand and appointments for a possible year in the future.