Her brows gloomed at a recurrence to that subject.  Their business of the expedition absorbed her, each detail, all the remarks he quoted of his chief, hopeful or weariful; for difficulties with the Spanish Government, and with the English too, started up at every turn; and the rank and file of the contingent were mostly a rough lot, where they were rather better than soaked weeds.  A small body of trained soldiers had sprung to the call to arms; here and there an officer could wheel a regiment.

Carinthia breasted discouragement.  ‘English learn from blows, Chillon.’

’He might have added, they lose half their number by having to learn from blows, Carin.’

‘He said, “Let me lead Britons!"’

‘When the canteen’s fifty leagues to the rear, yes!’

‘Yes, it is a wine country,’ she sighed.  ’But would the Spaniards have sent for us if their experience told them they could not trust us?’

Chillon brightened rigorously:  ’Yes, yes; there’s just a something about our men at their best, hard to find elsewhere.  We’re right in thinking that.  And our chief ‘s the right man.’

‘He is Owain’s friend and countryman,’ said Carinthia, and pleased, her brother for talking like a girl, in the midst of methodical calculations of the cost of this and that, to purchase the supplies he would need.  She had an organizing head.  On her way down from London she had drawn on instructions from a London physician of old Peninsula experience to pencil a list of the medical and surgical stores required by a campaigning army; she had gained information of the London shops where they were to be procured; she had learned to read medical prescriptions for the composition of drugs.  She was at her Spanish still, not behind him in the ordinary dialogue, and able to correct him on points of Spanish history relating to fortresses, especially the Basque.  A French bookseller had supplied her with the Vicomte d’Eschargue’s recently published volume of a Travels in Catalonia.  Chillon saw paragraphs marked, pages dog-eared, for reference.  At the same time, the question of Henrietta touched her anxiously.  Lady Arpington’s hints had sunk into them both.

’I have thought of St. Jean de Luz, Chillon, if Riette would consent to settle there.  French people are friendly.  You expect most of your work in and round the Spanish Pyrenees.’

‘Riette alone there?’ said he, and drew her by her love of him into his altered mind; for he did not object to his wife’s loneliness at Cadiz when their plan was new.

London had taught her that a young woman in the giddy heyday of her beauty has to be guarded; her belonging to us is the proud burden involving sacrifices.  But at St. Jean de Luz, if Riette would consent to reside there, Lord Fleetwood’s absence and the neighbourhood of the war were reckoned on to preserve his yokefellow from any fit of the abominated softness which she had felt in one premonitory tremor during their late interview, and deemed it vile compared with the life of action and service beside, almost beside, her brother, sharing his dangers at least.  She would have had Chillon speak peremptorily to his wife regarding the residence on the Spanish borders, adding, in a despair:  ‘And me with her to protect her!’