‘All should.  I don’t presume to allude to Lady Fleetwood.’

‘She has not charged you to complain?’

’ Lady Fleetwood is not the person to complain or condescend to speak of injuries.’

‘She insults me with her insane suspicion.’

A swollen vein on the young nobleman’s forehead went to confirm the idea at the Wythans’ that he was capable of mischief.  They were right; he was as capable of villany as of nobility.  But he happened to be thanking Gower Woodseer’s whip for the comfortable numbness he felt at Carinthia’s behaviour, while detesting her for causing him to desire it and endure it, and exonerate his prosy castigator.

He was ignorant of the revenge he had on Gower, whose diction had not been particularly estimable.  In the feebleness of a man vainly courting sleep, the disarmed philosopher tossed from one side to the other through the remaining hours of darkness, polishing sentences that were natural spouts of choicest diction; and still the earl’s virulent small sneer rankled.  He understood why, after a time.  The fervour of advocacy, which inspires high diction, had been wanting.  He had sought more to lash the earl with his personal disgust and partly to parade his contempt of a lucrative dependency—­than he had felt for the countess.  No wonder his diction was poor.  It was a sample of limp thinness; a sort of tongue of a Master Slender:—­flavourless, unsatisfactory, considering its object:  measured to be condemned by its poor achievement.  He had nevertheless a heart to feel for the dear lady, and heat the pleading for her, especially when it ran to its object, as along a shaft of the sun-rays, from the passionate devotedness of that girl Madge.

He brooded over it till it was like a fire beneath him to drive him from his bed and across the turfy roller of the hill to the Wythans’, in the front of an autumnal sunrise—­grand where the country is shorn of surface decoration, as here and there we find some unadorned human creature, whose bosom bears the ball of warmth.

CHAPTER XXXII

IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD FATHER’S LESSONS

Seated at his breakfast-table, the earl saw Gower stride in, and could have wagered he knew the destination of the fellow’s morning walk.  It concerned him little; he would be leaving the castle in less than an hour.  She might choose to come or choose to keep away.  The whims of animals do not affect men unless they are professionally tamers.  Petty domestic dissensions are besides poor webs to the man pulling singlehanded at ropes with his revolted miners.  On the topic of wages, too, he was Gower’s master, and could hold forth:  by which he taught himself to feel that practical affairs are the proper business of men, women and infants being remotely secondary; the picturesque and poetry, consequently, sheer nonsense.