‘Your box has been conveyed to your room,’ he said to his bride.

She bowed.  This time she descended the coach by the aid of the ladder.

Ines, victorious in battle, had scant notice from his love.  ’Yes, I ’m glad,’ and she passed him to follow her newly constituted mistress.  His pride was dashed, all the foam of the first draw on the top of him blown off, as he figuratively explained the cause of his gloom to the earl.  ’I drink and I gets a licking—­that girl nurses and cossets me.  I don’t drink and I whops my man—­she shows me her back.  Ain’t it encouragement, my lord?’

‘You ought to know them by this time, you dolt,’ returned his patron, and complimented him on his bearing in the fight.  ’You shall have your two hundred, and something will be added.  Hold handy here till I mount.  I start in ten minutes.’

Whether to speak a polite adieu to the bride, whose absurd position she had brought on her own head, was debated for half a minute.  He considered that the wet chalk-quarry of a beauty had at all events the merit of not being a creature to make scenes.  He went up to the sitting-room.  If she was not there, he would leave his excuses.

She was there, and seated; neither crying, nor smiling, nor pointedly serious in any way, not conventionally at her ease either.  And so clearly was he impressed by her transparency in simplicity of expression, that he took without a spurn at it the picture of a woman half drained of her blood, veiling the wound.  And a young woman, a stranger to suffering:  perhaps—­as the creatures do looking for the usual flummery tenderness, what they call happiness; wondering at the absence of it and the shifty ghost of a husband she has got by floundering into the bog known as Marriage.  She would have it, and here she was!

He entered the situation and was possessed by the shivering delicacy of it.  Surface emotions were not seen on her.  She might be a creature with a soul.  Here and there the thing has been found in women.  It is priceless when found, and she could not be acting.  One might swear the creature had no power to act.

She spoke without offence, the simplest of words, affected no solicitudes, put on no gilt smiles, wore no reproaches:  spoke to him as if so it happened—­he had necessarily a journey to perform.  One could see all the while big drops falling from the wound within.  One could hear it in her voice.  Imagine a crack of the string at the bow’s deep stress.  Or imagine the bow paralyzed at the moment of the deepest sounding.  And yet the voice did not waver.  She had now the richness of tone carrying on a music through silence.

Well, then, at least, he had not been the utterly duped fool he thought himself since the consent was pledged to wed her.