Now the month of December was the month of the Dame’s mysterious incident.  From the date of January, as Madge Winch knew, Christopher Ines had ceased to be in the service of the Earl of Fleetwood.  At Esslemont Park gates, one winter afternoon of a North-east wind blowing ‘rum-shrub into men for a stand against rheumatics,’ as he remarked, Ines met the girl by appointment, and informing her that he had money, and that Lord Fleetwood was ‘a black nobleman,’ he proposed immediate marriage.  The hymeneal invitation, wafted to her on the breath of rum-shrub, obtained no response from Madge until she had received evasive answers as to why the earl dismissed him, and whence the stock of money came.

Lord Fleetwood, he repeated, was a black nobleman.  She brought him to say of his knowledge, that Lord Fleetwood hated, and had reason to hate, Captain Levellier.  ’Shouldn’t I hate the man took my sweetheart from me and popped me into the noose with his sister instead?’ Madge was now advised to be overcome by the smell of rum-shrub:—­a mere fancy drink tossed off by heroes in their idle moments, before they settle down to the serious business of real drinking, Kit protested.  He simulated envious admiration of known heroes, who meant business, and scorned any of the weak stuff under brandy, and went at it till the bottles were the first to give in.  For why?  They had to stomach an injury from the world or their young woman, and half-way on they shoved that young person and all enemies aside, trampled ’em.  That was what Old O’Devy signified; and many’s the man driven to his consolation by a cat of a girl, who’s like the elements in their puffs and spits at a gallant ship, that rides the tighter and the tighter for all they can do to capsize.  ’Tighter than ever I was tight I’ll be to-night, if you can’t behave.’

They fell upon the smack of words.  Kit hitched and huffed away, threatening bottles.  Whatever he had done, it was to establish the petticoated hornet in the dignity of matron of a champion light-weight’s wholesome retreat of a public-house.  A spell of his larkish hilarity was for the punishment of the girl devoted to his heroical performances, as he still considered her to be, though women are notoriously volatile, and her language was mounting a stage above the kitchen.

Madge had little sorrow for him.  She was the girl of the fiery heart, not the large heart; she could never be devoted to more than one at a time, and her mistress had all her heart.  In relation to Kit, the thought of her having sacrificed her good name to him, flung her on her pride of chastity, without the reckoning of it as a merit.  It was the inward assurance of her independence:  the young spinster’s planting of the, standard of her proud secret knowledge of what she is, let it be a thing of worth or what you will, or the world think as it may.  That was her thought.