Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then.  She sent a short letter of reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she was unable to leave Wales because of her friend’s illness and her part as nurse.  Regrets were unmentioned.

Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death.  Not cheerlessly, more and more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for Carinthia’s ears in commending ’the most real of husbands of an unreal wife’ to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow he had wedded.  She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-no husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said; and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man’s remaining one chance of happiness.  On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was verily to hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the rich interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can find.  Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions when other people came under its light; she sketched them and their views in her brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh.  Gower Woodseer she read startlingly, if correctly.

Carinthia could not leave her.  Attendance upon this dying woman was a drinking at the springs of life.

Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady Fleetwood’s consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months old, —­and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had made provision.  Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.

In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of ’the four and twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the Kentish gates of Esslemont,’ has a foundation, though the story is not the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets, printed when London’s wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings. of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on whispers.

Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds of Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality, to give the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard.  London had intimations of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them in the interests of the national humour:  which is the English way of exalting to criticize, criticizing to depreciate, and depreciating to restore, ultimately to cherish, in reward for the amusement furnished by an eccentric person, not devoid of merit.