Although it was the hazard of a die, he decided to follow his taste.  Her stay at the castle had kept him long from the duties of his business; and he could imagine it a grievance if he pleased, but he put it aside.  Alighting at his chief manager’s office, he passed through the heated atmosphere of black-browed, wiry little rebels, who withheld the salute as they lounged:  a posture often preceding the spring in compulsorily idle workers.  He was aware of instinct abroad, an antagonism to the proprietor’s rights.  They roused him to stand by them, and were his own form of instinct, handsomely clothed.  It behoved that he should examine them and the claims against them, to be sure of his ground.  He and Mr. Howell Edwards debated the dispute for an hour; agreeing, partially differing.  There was a weakness on the principle in Edwards.  These fellows fixed to the spot are for compromise too much.  An owner of mines has no steady reckoning of income if the rate of wage is perpetually to shift according to current, mostly ignorant, versions of the prosperity of the times.  Are we so prosperous?  It is far from certain.  And if the rate ascends, the question of easing it down to suit the discontinuance of prosperity agitating our exchequer—­whose demand is for fixity—­ perplexes us further.

However, that was preliminary.  He and Howell Edwards would dine and wrangle it out.  The earl knew himself a hot disputant after dinner.  Incidentally he heard of Lady Fleetwood as a guest of Mrs. Wythan; and the circumstance was injurious to him because he stood against Mr. Wythan’s pampering system with his men.

Ines up at the castle smelt of beer, and his eyelids were sottish.  Nothing to do tries the virtue of the best.  He sought his excuse in a heavy lamentation over my lady’s unjust suspicion of him,—­a known man of honour, though he did serve his paytron.

The cause of Lady Fleetwood’s absence was exposed to her outraged lord, who had sent the man purely to protect her at this castle, where she insisted on staying.  The suspicion cast on the dreary lusher was the wife’s wild shot at her husband.  One could understand a silly woman’s passing terror.  Her acting under the dictate of it struck the husband’s ribbed breast as a positive clap of hostilities between them across a chasm.

His previous placable mood was immediately conceived by him to have been one of his fits of generosity; a step to a frightful dutiful embrace of an almost repulsive object.  He flung the thought of her back on her Whitechapel.  She returned from that place with smiles, dressed in a laundry white with a sprinkle of smuts, appearing to him as an adversary armed and able to strike.  There was a blow, for he chewed resentments; and these were goaded by a remembered shyness of meeting her eyes when he rounded up the slope of the hill, in view of his castle, where he supposed she would be awaiting ‘my husband.’  The silence of her absence was lively mockery of that anticipation.