night.  They hardly spoke; they strangled thoughts forming as larvae of wishes.  Henrietta would be away to Lady Arpington’s next day, Mr. Wythan to Wales.  The two voyagers were sadder by sympathy than the two whom they were leaving to the clock’s round of desert sameness.  About ten at night Chillon and Mr. Wythan escorted Carinthia, for the night’s watch beside her uncle, down to Lekkatts.  It was midway that the knocks on air, as of a muffled mallet at a door and at farther doors of caverns, smote their ears and shook the ground.

After an instant of the silence following a shock, Carinthia touched her brother’s arm; and Chillon said: 

‘Not my powder!’

They ran till they had Lekkatts in sight.  A half moon showed the house; it stood.  Fifty paces below, a column of opal smoke had begun to wreathe and stretch a languid flag.  The ‘rouse’ promised to Lord Levellier by Daniel Charner’s humorous mates had hit beyond its aim.  Intended to give him a start—­or ‘One-er in return,’ it surpassed his angry shot at the body of them in effect.

Carinthia entered his room and saw that he was lying stretched restfully.  She whispered of this to Chillon, and began upon her watch, reading her Spanish phrasebook; and she could have wept, if she had been a woman for tears.  Her duty to stay in England with Chillon’s fair wife crossed the beckoning pages like a black smoke.  Her passion to go and share her brother’s dangers left the question of its righteousness at each fall of the big breath.

Her uncle’s grey head on his pillow was like a flintstone in chalk under her look by light of dawn; the chin had dropped.

CHAPTER XLVI

A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES

Thus a round and a good old English practical repartee, worthy a place in England’s book of her historical popular jests; conceived ingeniously, no bit murderously, even humanely, if Englishmen are to be allowed indulgence of a jolly hit back for an injury—­more a feint than a real stroke—­gave the miserly veteran his final quake and cut Chillon’s knot.

Lord Levellier dead of the joke detracted from the funny idea there had been in the anticipation of his hearing the libertine explosion of his grand new powder, and coming out cloaked to see what walls remained upright.  Its cleverness, however, was magnified by the shades into which it had despatched him.  The man who started the ‘rouse for old Griphard’ was named:  nor did he shuffle his honours off.  Chillon accused him, and he regretfully grinned; he would have owned to it eloquently, excited by the extreme ingenuity, but humour at the criminal bar is an abject thing, that has to borrow from metaphysics for the expository words.  He lacked them entirely, and as he could not, fronting his master, supply the defect with oaths, he drew up and let out on the dead old lord, who wanted a few pounds of blasting powder,