Gower Woodseer’s engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject for expatiation and agreement.  Her deeper tones threw a light on Gower, and where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural philosopher practically philosophizing.

‘The girl shall have a dowry from me,’ he said; and the sum named was large.  Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her now.  His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.

He wished her ladyship good-night.  She stood up and performed a semi-ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position.  She had a well-bred mother.

Probably she would sleep.  No such expectation could soothe the friend, and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had ocular proof that the body lay underground.  His promise was given to follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth.  Ambrose died of the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded.  Two intimate associates of the dead man swore to that habit of his.  They lied to get him undisputed Christian burial.  Aha!  The earl laughed outright at Chummy Potts’s nursery qualms.  The old fellow had to do it, and he lied like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard’s family.  So much is owing to our friend.

Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting men of the world?

A council sat upon the case the whole night long.  A committee of the worldly held argumentation in a lower chamber.

These are nights that weaken us to below the level of women.  A shuttle worked in Fleetwood’s head.  He defended the men of the world.  Lord Feltre oiled them, damned them, kindled them to a terrific expiatory blaze, and extinguishingly salved and wafted aloft the released essence of them.  Maniacal for argument, Fleetwood rejected the forgiveness of sins, if sins they be.  Prove them sins, and the suffering is of necessity everlasting, his insomnia logic insisted.  Whichever side he took, his wife was against him; not in speech, but in her look.  She was a dumb figure among the wranglers, clouded up to the neck.  Her look said she knew more of him than they knew.

He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal.  Knowing it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to propitiate—­and his lips pecked the baby’s cheek.  Its mother held arms for it immediately.

Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with little of a mind to see.