‘This is one of the hopeful marriages; chiefly of your making.’

She replied:  ‘My prayers will be for them always.’

‘They are fortunate who have your prayers,’ he said, and turned to Sarah Winch.  She was to let him know when she also had found her ’great philosopher.’  Sarah was like a fish on a bank, taking gasps at the marvel of it all; she blushed the pale pink of her complexion, and murmured of ‘happiness.’  Gower had gone headlong into happiness, where philosophers are smirkers and mouthers of ordinary stuff.  His brightest remark was to put the question to his father:  ’The three good things of the Isle of Britain?’ and treble the name of Madge Woodseer for a richer triad than the Glamorgan man could summon.  Pardonably foolish; but mindful of a past condition of indiscipline, Nature’s philosopher said to the old minister:  ’Your example saved me for this day at a turn of my road, sir.’  Nature’s poor wild scholar paid that tribute to the regimental sectarian.  Enough for proud philosophy to have done the thing demonstrably right, Gower’s look at his Madge and the world said.  That ‘European rose of the coal-black order,’ as one of his numerous pictures of her painted the girl, was a torch in a cavern for dusky redness at her cheeks.  Her responses beneath the book Mr. Woodseer held open had flashed a distant scene through Lord Fleetwood.  Quaint to notice was her reverence for the husband she set on a towering monument, and her friendly, wifely; whispered jogs at the unpractical creature’s forgetfulness of his wraps, his books; his writing-desk—­on this tremendous occasion, his pipe.  Again the earl could have sworn, that despite her antecedents, she brought her husband honest dower, as surely as she gave the lucky Pagan a whole heart; and had a remarkably fine bust to house the organ, too; and a clarionet of a voice, curiously like her, mistress’s.  And not a bad fellow, but a heathen dog, a worshipper of Nature, walked off with the girl, whose voice had the ring of Carinthia’s.  The Powers do not explain their dispensations.

These two now one by united good-will for the junction Lord Fleetwood himself drove through Loudon to the hills, where another carriage awaited them by his orders, in the town of London’s race-course.  As soon as they were seated he nodded to them curtly from his box, and drove back, leaving them puzzled.  But his countess had not so very coldly seen him start his horses to convey the modest bridal pair.  His impulses to kindness could be politic.  Before quitting Whitechapel, she went with Sarah to look at the old shop of the fruits and vegetables.  They found it shut, untenanted; Mr. Woodseer told them that the earl was owner of it by recent purchase, and would not lease it.  He had to say why; for the countess was dull to the notion of a sentimental desecration in the occupying of her bedchamber by poor tradespeople.  She was little flattered.  The great nobleman of her imagination when she lay there dwindled to a whimsy infant, despot of his nursery, capricious with his toys; likely to damage himself, if left to himself.