‘The grounds of your coming, my lord, are not seen; my time is short.’

’I must, I repeat, be consulted with regard to Lady Fleetwood’s movements.’

‘My sister does not acknowledge your claim.’

‘The Countess of Fleetwood’s acts involve her husband.’

‘One has to listen at times to what old sailors call Caribbee!’ Chillon exclaimed impatiently, half aloud.  ’My sister received your title; she has to support it.  She did not receive the treatment of a wife:—­ or lady, or woman, or domestic animal.  The bond is broken, as far as it bears on her subjection.  She holds to the rite, thinks it sacred.  You can be at rest as to her behaviour.  In other respects, your lordship does not exist for her.’

‘The father of her child must exist for her.’

‘You raise that curtain, my lord!’

In the presence of three it would not bear a shaking.

Carinthia said, in pity of his torture:—­

’I have my freedom, and am thankful for it, to follow my brother, to share his dangers with him.  That is more to me than luxury and the married state.  I take only my freedom.’

‘Our boy?  You take the boy?’

’My child is with my sister Henrietta!

‘Where?’

‘We none know yet.’

‘You still mistrust me?’

Her eyes were on a man that she had put from her peaceably; and she replied, with sweetness in his ears, with shocks to a sinking heart, ’My lord, you may learn to be a gentle father to the child.  I pray you may.  My brother and I will go.  If it is death for us, I pray my child may have his father, and God directing his father.’

Her speech had the clang of the final.

‘Yes, I hope—­if it be the worst happening, I pray, too,’ said he, and drooped and brightened desperately:  ’But you, too, Carinthia, you could aid by staying, by being with the boy and me.  Carinthia!’ he clasped her name, the vapour left to him of her:  ’I have learnt learnt what I am, what you are; I have to climb a height to win back the wife I threw away.  She was unknown to me; I to myself nearly as much.  I sent a warning of the kind of husband for you—­a poor kind; I just knew myself well enough for that.  You claimed my word—­the blessing of my life, if I had known it!  We were married; I played—­I see the beast I played.  Money is power, they say.  I see the means it is to damn the soul, unless we—­ unless a man does what I do now.’

Fleetwood stopped.  He had never spoken such words—­arterial words, as they were, though the commonest, and with moist brows, dry lips, he could have resumed, have said more, have taken this woman, this dream of the former bride, the present stranger, into his chamber of the brave aims and sentenced deeds.  Her brother in the room was the barrier; and she sat mute, large-eyed, expressionless.  He had plunged low in the man’s hearing; the air of his lungs was thick, hard to breathe, for shame of a degradation so extreme.