More, she had beauty—­of its kind.  Or splendour or grandeur, was the term for it.  But it bore no name.  None of her qualities—­if they were qualities—­had a name.  She stood with a dignity that the word did not express.  She endured meekly, when there was no meekness.  Pain breathed out of her, and not a sign of pain was visible.  She had, under his present observation of her, beauty, with the lines of her face breaking in revolt from beauty—­or requiring a superterrestrial illumination to show the harmony.  He, as he now saw, had erred grossly in supposing her insensitive, and therefore slow of a woman’s understanding.  She drew the breath of pain through the lips:  red lips and well cut.  Her brown eyes were tearless, not alluring or beseeching or repelling; they did but look, much like the skies opening high aloof on a wreck of storm.  Her reddish hair-chestnut, if you will—­let fall a skein over one of the rugged brows, and softened the ruggedness by making it wilder, as if a great bird were winging across a shoulder of the mountain ridges.  Conceived of the mountains, built in their image, the face partook alternately of mountain terror or splendour; wholly, he remembered, of the splendour when her blood ran warm.  No longer the chalk-quarry face,—­its paleness now was that of night Alps beneath a moon chasing the shadows.

She might be casting her spells again.

‘You remember I told you,’ he said, ’I have given my word—­I don’t break it—­to be at a Ball.  Your uncle was urgent to have the ceremony over.  These clashes occur.  The people here—­I have spoken of that:  people of good repute for attention to guests.  I am uncertain of the time . . . we have all to learn to wait.  So then, good-bye till we meet.’

He was experiencing a novel nip of torment, of just the degree which takes a partial appeasement from the inflicting of it, and calls up a loathed compassion.  She might have been in his arms for a step, though she would not have been the better loved.

He was allowed his escape, bearing with him enough of husband to execrate another enslaving pledge of his word, that begat a frenzy to wreak some caresses on the creature’s intolerably haunting image.  Of course, he could not return to her.  How would she receive him?  There was no salt in the thought of it; she was too submissive.

However, there would be fun with Chummy Potts on the drive to Canleys; fun with Rufus Abrane at Mrs. Cowper Quillett’s; and with the Countess Livia, smothered, struggling, fighting for life with the title of Dowager.  A desire for unbridled fun had hold of any amount of it, to excess in any direction.  And though this cloud as a dry tongue after much wine craves water, glimpses of his tramp’s walk with a fellow tramp on a different road, enjoying strangely healthy vagabond sensations and vast ideas; brought the vagrant philosopher refreshfully to his mind:  chiefly for the reason that while in Woodseer’s company he had hardly suffered a stroke of pain from the thought of Henrietta.  She was now a married woman, he was a married man by the register.  Stronger proof of the maddest of worlds could not be furnished.