‘You and I cannot be strangers or enemies.’

‘We cannot be, I would not be.  To be friends, we should be separate.’

’You say you are a woman; you have a heart, then?’—­for, if not, what have you? was added in the tone.

‘My heart is my brother’s,’ she said.

‘All your heart?’

‘My heart is my brother’s until one of us drops.’

‘There is not another on earth beside your brother Chillon?’

‘There is my child.’

The dwarf square tower of Croridge village church fronted them against the sky, seen of both.

‘You remember it,’ he said; and she answered:  ‘I was married there.’

‘You have not forgotten that injury, Carinthia?’

‘I am a mother.’

’By all the saints! you hit hard.  Justly.  Not you.  Our deeds are the hard hitters.  We learn when they begin to flagellate, stroke upon stroke!  Suppose we hold a costly thing in the hand and dash it to the ground—­no recovery of it, none!  That must be what your father meant.  I can’t regret you are a mother.  We have a son, a bond.  How can I describe the man I was!’ he muttered,—­’possessed! sort of werewolf!  You are my wife?’

‘I was married to you, my lord.’

‘It’s a tie of a kind.’

‘It binds me.’

‘Obey, you said.’

‘Obey it.  I do.’

‘You consider it holy?’

’My father and my mother spoke to me of the marriage-tie.  I read the service before I stood at the altar.  It is holy.  It is dreadful.  I will be true to it.’

‘To your husband?’

‘To his name, to his honour.’

‘To the vow to live with him?’

‘My husband broke that for me.’

’Carinthia, if he bids you, begs you to renew it?  God knows what you may save me from!’

’Pray to God.  Do not beg of me, my lord.  I have my brother and my little son.  No more of husband for me!  God has given me a friend, too, —­a man of humble heart, my brother’s friend, my dear Rebecca’s husband.  He can take them from me:  no one but God.  See the splendid sky we have.’

With those words she barred the gates on him; at the same time she bestowed the frank look of an amiable face brilliant in the lively red of her exercise, in its bent-bow curve along the forehead, out of the line of beauty, touching, as her voice was, to make an undertone of anguish swell an ecstasy.  So he felt it, for his mood was now the lover’s.  A torture smote him, to find himself transported by that voice at his ear to the scene of the young bride in thirty-acre meadow.

‘I propose to call on Captain Kirby-Levellier tomorrow, Carinthia,’ he said.  ‘The name of his house?’

‘My brother is not now any more in the English army,’ she replied.  ’He has hired a furnished house named Stoneridge.’

‘He will receive me, I presume?’

‘My brother is a courteous gentleman, my lord.’