In fine, he was a millionaire nobleman, owning to a considerable infusion of Welsh blood in the composition of him.  Now, to the Cymry and to the pure Kelt, the past is at their elbows continually.  The past of their lives has lost neither face nor voice behind the shroud; nor are the passions of the flesh, nor is the animate soul, wanting to it.  Other races forfeit infancy, forfeit youth and manhood with their progression to the wisdom age may bestow.  These have each stage always alive, quick at a word, a scent, a sound, to conjure up scenes, in spirit and in flame.  Historically, they still march with Cadwallader, with Llewellyn, with Glendower; sing with Aneurin, Taliesin, old Llywarch:  individually, they are in the heart of the injury done them thirty years back or thrilling to the glorious deed which strikes an empty buckler for most of the sons of Time.  An old sea rises in them, rolling no phantom billows to break to spray against existing rocks of the shore.  That is why, and even if they have a dose of the Teuton in them, they have often to feel themselves exiles when still in amicable community among the preponderating Saxon English.

Add to the single differentiation enormous wealth—­we convulse the excellent Dame by terming it a chained hurricane, to launch in foul blasts or beneficent showers, according to the moods during youth—­and the composite Lord Fleetwood comes nearer into our focus.  Dame Gossip, with her jigging to be at the butterwoman’s trot, when she is not violently interrupting, would suffer just punishment were we to digress upon the morality of a young man’s legal possession of enormous wealth as well.

Wholly Cambrian Fleetwood was not.  But he had to the full the Cambrian’s reverential esteem for high qualities.  His good-bye with Henrietta, and estimate of her, left a dusky mental, void requiring an orb of some sort for contemplation; and an idea of the totally contrary Carinthia, the woman he had avowedly wedded, usurped her place.  Qualities were admitted.  She was thrust away because she had offended:  still more because he had offended.  She bore the blame for forcing him to an examination of his conduct at this point and that, where an ancestral savage in his lineaments cocked a strange eye.  Yet at the moment of the act of the deed he had known himself the veritable Fleetwood.  He had now to vindicate himself by extinguishing her under the load of her unwomanliness:  she was like sun-dried linen matched beside oriental silk:  she was rough, crisp, unyielding.  That was now the capital charge.  Henrietta could never be guilty of the unfeminine.  Which did he prefer?

It is of all questions the one causing young men to screw wry faces when they are asked; they do so love the feminine, the ultra-feminine, whom they hate for her inclination to the frail.  His depths were sounded, and he answered independently of his will, that he must be up to the heroical pitch to decide.  Carinthia stood near him then.  The confession was a step, and fraught with consequences.  Her unacknowledged influence expedited him to Sarah Winch’s shop, for sight of one of earth’s honest souls; from whom he had the latest of the two others down in Wales, and of an infant there.