scale of the human balance,’ as Woodseer calls her now he has got her, wiser than Lord Feltre in reference to men and women.  We get no balance without her.  That is apparently the positive law; and by reason of men’s wretched enslavement, it is the dance to dissolution when we have not honourable union with women.  Feltre’s view of women sees the devilish or the angelical; and to most men women are knaves or ninnies.  Hence do we behold rascals or imbeciles in the offspring of most men.

He embraced the respected woman’s character, with the usual effect:  —­to see with her sight; and she beheld a speckled creature of the intermittent whims and moods and spites; the universal Patron, whose ambition to be leader of his world made him handle foul brutes—­corrupt and cause their damnation, they retort, with curses, in their pangs.  She was expected to pardon the husband, who had not abstained from his revenge on her for keeping him to the pledge of his word.  And what a revenge!—­he had flung the world at her.  She is consequently to be the young bride she was on the memorable morning of the drive off these heights of Croridge down to thirty-acre meadow!  It must be a saint to forgive such offences; and she is not one, she is deliciously not one, neither a Genevieve nor a Griselda.  He handed her the rod to chastise him.  Her exchange of Christian names with the Welshman would not do it; she was too transparently sisterly, provincially simple; she was, in fact, respected.  Any whipping from her was child’s play to him, on whom, if he was to be made to suffer, the vision of the intense felicity of austerest asceticism brought the sensation as bracingly as the Boreal morning animates men of high blood in ice regions.  She could but gently sting, even if vindictive.

Along the heights, outside the village, some way below a turn of the road to Lekkatts, a gentleman waved hand.  The earl saluted with his whip, and waited for him.

‘Nothing wrong, Mr. Wythan?’

‘Nothing to fear, my lord.’

‘I get a trifle uneasy.’

‘The countess will not leave her brother.’

A glow of his countess’s friendliness for this open-faced, prompt-speaking, good fellow of the faintly inky eyelids, and possibly sheepish inclinations, melted Fleetwood.  Our downright repentance of misconduct toward a woman binds us at least to the tolerant recognition of what poor scraps of consolement she may have picked up between then and now—­when we can stretch fist in flame to defy it on the oath of her being a woman of honour.

The earl alighted and said:  ’Her brother, I suspect, is the key of the position.’

‘He’s worth it—­she loves her brother,’ said Mr. Wythan, betraying a feature of his quick race, with whom the reflection upon a statement is its lightning in advance.

Gratified by the instant apprehension of his meaning, Fleetwood interpreted the Welshman’s.  ’I have to see the brother worthy of her love.  Can you tell me the hour likely to be convenient?’. . . . .