Let matters go on as they are.  We know our personal worth.

Arrived at this point in the perpetual round of the conflict Carinthia had implanted, Fleetwood entered anew the ranks of the ordinary men of wealth and a coronet, and he hugged himself.  He enjoyed repose; knowing it might be but a truce.  Matters might go on as they were.  Still, he wished her away from those Wythans, residing at Esslemont.  There she might come eventually to a better knowledge of his personal worth:—­’the gold mine we carry in our bosoms till it is threshed out of us in sweat,’ that fellow Gower Woodseex says; adding, that we are the richer for not exploring it.  Philosophical cynicism is inconclusive.  Fleetwood knew his large capacities; he had proved them and could again.  In case a certain half foreseen calamity should happen:—­imagine it a fact, imagine him seized, besides admiring her character, with a taste for her person!  Why, then, he would have to impress his own mysteriously deep character on her portion of understanding.  The battle for domination would then begin.

Anticipation of the possibility of it hewed division between the young man’s pride of being and his warmer feelings.  Had he been free of the dread of subjection, he would have sunk to kiss the feet of the statuesque young woman, arms in air, firm-fronted over the hideous death that tore at her skirts.

CHAPTER XXXIV

A survey of the ride of the Welsh cavaliers escorting the countess of Fleetwood to Kentish Esslemont

A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive her, autocratically concealed her lord’s impatience to have her there; and by the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were marked, as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady would find preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered mother’s mind on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the father’s hatred, second to his hatred of the mother.  But the mother could defend herself, the child was prey. the child of a detested wife was heir to his title and estates.  His look at the child, his hasty one look down at her innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick at a stone in his path.  His indifference to the child’s Christian names pointed darkly over its future.

The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her thoughts.  She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her till breath was gone.  Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty of maltreating this woman of women.  ‘But when you do leave Wales,’ he said, ‘you shall be guarded up to your haven.’