‘Her ladyship goes.’

’A woman without religion, Gower Woodseer, is a weed on the water, or she’s hard as nails.  We shall see.  Generally, Madge and the youngster parade the park at this hour.  I drive round to the stables.  Go in and offer your version of that rascally dog’s trick.  It seems the nearest we can come at.  He’s a sot, and drunken dogs ’ll do anything.  I’ve had him on my hands, and I’ve got the stain of him.’

They trotted through Esslemont Park gates.  ’I’ve got that place, Calesford, on my hands, too,’ the earl said, suddenly moved to a liking for his Kentish home.

He and Gower were struck by a common thought of the extraordinary burdens his indulgence in impulses drew upon him.  Present circumstances pictured to Gower the opposing weighed and matured good reason for his choosing Madge, and he complimented himself in his pity for the earl.  But Fleetwood, as he reviewed a body of acquaintances perfectly free from the wretched run in harness, though they had their fits and their whims, was pushed to the conclusion that fatalism marked his particular course through life.  He could not hint at such an idea to the unsympathetic fellow, or rather, the burly antagonist to anything of the sort, beside him.  Lord Feltre would have understood and appreciated it instantly.  Where is aid to be had if we have the Fates against us?  Feltre knew the Power, he said; was an example of ‘the efficacy of supplications’; he had been ‘fatally driven to find the Power,’ and had found it—­on the road to Rome, of course:  not a delectable road for an English nobleman, except that the noise of another convert in pilgrimage on it would deal our English world a lively smack, the very stroke that heavy body wants.  But the figure of a ‘monastic man of fashion’ was antipathetic to the earl, and he flouted an English Protestant mass merely because of his being highly individual, and therefore revolutionary for the minority.

He cast his bitter cud aside.  ’My man should have arrived.  Lady Fleetwood at home?’

Gower spoke of her having gone to Croridge in the morning.

‘Has she taken the child?’

‘She has, yes.  For the air of the heights.’

’For greater security.  Lady Arpington praises the thoughtful mother.  I rather expected to see the child.’

‘They can’t be much later,’ Gower supposed.

‘You don’t feel your long separation from “the object"?’

Letting him have his cushion for pins, Gower said ’It needs all my philosophy: 

He was pricked and probed for the next five minutes; not bad rallying, the earl could be smart when he smarted.  Then they descended the terrace to meet Lady Fleetwood driving her pony-trap.  She gave a brief single nod to the salute of her lord, quite in the town-lady’s manner, surprisingly.

CHAPTER XLI

IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM THEM