like anything else in everybody’s way.  Chillon expected the lowest of his countrymen to show some degree of chivalry upon occasions like the present.  He was too young to perceive how it is, that a block of our speech in the needed direction drives it storming in another, not the one closely expressing us.  Carinthia liked the man; she was grieved to hear of his having got the sack summarily, when he might have had a further month of service or a month’s pay.  Had not the workmen’s forbearance been much tried?  And they had not stolen, they had bought the powder, only intending to startle.

She touched her brother’s native sense of fairness and vexed him with his cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common man, and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly.  Just as her father would have—­treated the matter, she said:  ’Are we sorry for what has happened, Chillon?’ The man had gone, the injustice was done; the master was left to reflect on the part played by his inheritance of the half share of ninety thousand pounds in his proper respect for Lord Levellier’s memory.  Harsh to an inferior is a horrible charge.  But the position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance.  Knowing a part of Lord Fleetwood’s message to Lord Levellier suppressed, the bride’s brother, her chief guardian, had treated the omission as of no importance, and had all the while understood that he ought to give her his full guess at the reading of it:  or so his racked mind understood it now.  His old father had said:  A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar; and, Lies are usurers’ coin we pay for ten thousand per cent.  His harshness in the past hour to a workman who had suffered with him and had not intended serious mischief was Chillon’s unsounded motive for the resolution to be out of debt to the man he loathed.  There is a Muse that smiles aloft surveying our acts from the well-springs.

Carinthia heard her brother’s fuller version of the earl’s communication to her uncle before the wild day of her marriage.  ’Not particularly fitted for the married state,’ Chillon phrased it, saying:  ’He seems to have known himself, he was honest so far.’  She was advised to think it over, that the man was her husband.

She had her brother’s heart in her breast, she could not misread him.  She thought it over, and felt a slight drag of compassion for the reluctant bridegroom.  That was a stretch long leagues distant from love with her; the sort of feeling one has for strange animals hurt and she had in her childish blindness done him a hurt, and he had bitten her.  He was a weak young nobleman; he had wealth for a likeness of strength; he had no glory about his head.  Why had he not chosen a woman to sit beside him who would have fancied his coronet a glory and his luxury a kindness?  But the poor young nobleman did not choose!  The sadly comic of his keeping to the pledge of his word—­his real wife—­the tyrant of the tyrant—­clothed him; the vision of him at the altar, and on the coach, and at the Royal Sovereign Inn, and into the dimness where a placidly smiling recollection met a curtain and lost the smile.