‘I suppose your waiting here is useless, to quote you,’ he said.  ’The countess can decide now to remain, if she pleases.  Drive with me to Cardiff—­I miss you if you ’re absent a week.  Or is it legs?  Drop me a line of your stages on the road, and don’t loiter much.’

Gower spoke of starting his legs next day, if he had to do the journey alone:  and he clouded the yacht for Fleetwood with talk of the Wye and the Usk, Hereford and the Malvern Hills elliptical over the plains.

‘Yes,’ the earl acquiesced jealously; ’we ought to have seen—­tramped every foot of our own country.  That yacht of mine, there she is, and I said I would board her and have a fly with half a dozen fellows round the Scottish isles.  We’re never free to do as we like.’

‘Legs are the only things that have a taste of freedom,’ said Gower.

They strolled down to Howell Edwards’ office at nine, Kit Ines beside the luggage cart to the rear.

Around the office and along to the street of the cottages crowds were chattering, gesticulating; Ines fancied the foreign jabberers inclined to threaten.  Howell Edwards at the door of his office watched them calculatingly.  The lord of their destinies passed in with him, leaving Gower to study the features of the men, and Ines to reckon the chance of a fray.

Fleetwood came out presently, saying to Edwards: 

’That concession goes far enough.  Because I have a neighbour who yields at every step?  No, stick to the principle.  I’ve said my final word.  And here’s the carriage.  If the mines are closed, more’s the pity:  but I’m not responsible.  You can let them know if you like, before I drive off; it doesn’t matter to me.’

The carriage was ready.  Gower cast a glance up the hill.  Three female figures and a pannier-donkey were visible on the descent.  He nodded to Edwards, who took the words out of his mouth.  ‘Her ladyship, my lord.’

She was distinctly seen, and looked formidable in definition against the cloud.  Madge and the nurse-maid Martha were the two other young women.  On they came, and the, angry man seated in the carriage could not give the order to start.  Nor could he quite shape an idea of annoyance, though he hung to it and faced at Gower a battery of the promise to pay him for this.  Tattling observers were estimated at their small importance there, as everywhere, by one so high above them.  But the appearance of the woman of the burlesque name and burlesque actions, and odd ascension out of the ludicrous into a form to cast a spell, so that she commanded serious recollections of her, disturbed him.  He stepped from his carriage.  Again he had his incomprehensible fit of shyness; and a vision of the complacent, jowled, redundant, blue-coated monarch aswing in imbecile merriment on the signboard of the Royal Sovereign inn; constitutionally his total opposite, yet instigating the sensation.

In that respect his countess and he had shifted characters.  Carinthia came on at her bold mountain stride to within hail of him.  Met by Gower, she talked, smiled, patted her donkey, clutched his ear, lifted a silken covering to show the child asleep; entirely at her ease and unhurried.  These women get aid from their pride of maternity.  And when they can boast a parson behind them, they are indecorous up to insolent in their ostentation of it.