Mr. Wythan thought an appointment unnecessary which conveyed the sufficient assurance of audience granted.

‘You know her brother well, Mr. Wythan?’

’Know him as if I had known him for years.  They both come to the mind as faith comes—­no saying how; one swears by them.’

Fleetwood eyed the Welsh gentleman, with an idea that he might readily do the same by him.

Mr. Wythan’s quarters were at the small village inn, whither he was on his way to breakfast.  The earl slipped an arm through the bridle reins and walked beside him, listening to an account of the situation at Lekkatts.  It was that extraordinary complication of moves and checks which presents in the main a knot, for the powers above to cut.  A miserly old lord withholds arrears of wages; his workmen strike at a critical moment; his nephew, moved by common humanity, draws upon crippled resources to supply their extremer needs, though they are ruining his interests.  They made one night a demonstration of the terrorizing sort round Lekkatts, to give him a chorus; and the old lord fired at them out of window and wounded a man.  For that they vowed vengeance.  All the new gunpowder milled in Surrey was, for some purpose of his own, stored by Lord Levellier on the alder island of the pond near his workshops, a quarter of a mile below the house.  They refused, whatever their object, to let a pound of it be moved, at a time when at last the Government had undertaken to submit it to experiments.  And there they stood on ground too strong for ‘the Captain,’ as they called him, to force, because of the quantity stored at Lekkatts being largely beyond the amount under cover of Lord Levellier’s licence.  The old lord was very ill, and he declined to see a doctor, but obstinately kept from dying.  His nephew had to guard him and at the same time support an enemy having just cause of complaint.  This, however, his narrow means would not much longer permit him to do.  The alternative was then offered him of either siding arbitrarily against the men and his conscience or of taking a course ‘imprudent on the part of a presumptive heir,’ Mr. Wythan said hurriedly at the little inn’s doorsteps.

‘You make one of his lordship’s guard?’ said Fleetwood.

‘The countess, her brother, and I, yes’

‘Danger at all?’

‘Not so much to fear while the countess is with us.’

‘Fear is not a word for Carinthia.’

Her name on the earl’s lips drew a keen shot of the eye from Mr. Wythan, and he read the signification of the spoken name.  ’You know what every Cambrian living thinks of her, my lord.’

‘She shall not have one friend the less for me.’

Fleetwood’s hand was out for a good-bye, and the hand was grasped by one who looked happy in doing it.  He understood and trusted the man after that, warmed in thinking how politic his impulses could be.

His intention of riding up to Croridge at noon to request his interview with Mr. Kirby-Levellier was then stated.