The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last.  Fleetwood went, like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in the back turned to his wife’s along the corridor, that our ordinary comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct.  She was Arctic, and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put between them.  A removal of either of them from life—­or from ’the act of breathing,’ as Gower Woodseer’s contempt of the talk about death would call it—­was an imaginable way of making it a wider division.  Ambrose Mallard was far enough from his fatal lady now—­farther than the Poles asunder.  Ambrose, if the clergy will allow him, has found his peace. .  But the road and the means he chose were a madman’s.

The blotting of our character, to close our troubles, is the final proof of our being ‘sons of vapour,’ according to Gower Woodseer’s heartless term for poor Ambrose and the lot.  They have their souls; and above philosophy, ‘natural’ or unnatural, they may find a shelter.  They can show in their desperation that they are made of blood, as philosophers rather fail of doing.  An insignificant brainless creature like Feltre had wits, by the aid of his religion, to help or be charitable to his fellows, particularly the sinners, in the crisis of life, surpassing any philosopher’s.

Information of her ladyship’s having inspected the apartments, to see to the minutest of his customary luxuries, cut at him all round.  His valet had it from the footmen and maids; and their speaking of it meant a liking for their mistress; and that liking, added to her official solicitude on his behalf, touched a soft place in him and blew an icy wind; he was frozen where he was warmed.  Here was evidence of her intending the division to be a fixed gap.  She had entered this room and looked about her.  He was here to feel her presence in her absence.

Some one or something had schooled her, too.  Her large-eyed directness of gaze was the same as at that inn and in Wales, but her easy sedateness was novel, her English, almost the tone of the English world:  he gathered it, at least, from the few remarks below stairs.

His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate.  He could kill illusion by magnifying and clawing at her visible angles and audible false notes; and he did it until his recollections joined to the sight of her, when a clash of the thought of what she had been and the thought of what she was had the effect of conjuring a bitter sweet image that was a more seductive illusion.  Strange to think, this woman once loved the man who was not half the value of the man she no longer loved.  He took a shot at cynicism, but hit no mark.  This woman protected her whole sex.