Carinthia had observed her.  She was heart-sick under pressure of thoughts the heavier for being formless.  They signified in the sum her doom to see her brother leave England for the war, and herself crumble to pieces from the imagined figure of herself beside him on or near the field.  They could not be phrased, for they accused the beloved brother of a weakness in the excessive sense of obligation to the beautiful woman who had wedded him.  Driving down to Southampton by the night-coach, her tenderness toward Henrietta held other thoughts unshaped, except one, that moved in its twilight, murmuring of how the love of pleasure keeps us blind children.  And how the innocents are pushed by it to snap at wicked bait, which the wealthy angle with, pointed a charitable index on some of our social story.  The Countess Livia, not an innocent like Henrietta had escaped the poisoned tongues by contracting a third marriage—­’in time!’ Lady Arpington said; and the knotty question was presented to a young mind:  Why are the innocents tempted to their ruin, and the darker natures allowed an escape?  Any street-boy could have told her of the virtue in quick wits.  But her unexercised reflectiveness was on the highroad of accepted doctrines, with their chorus of the moans of gossips for supernatural intervention to give us justice.  She had not learnt that those innocents, pushed by an excessive love of pleasure, are for the term lower in the scale than their wary darker cousins, and must come to the diviner light of intelligence through suffering.

However, the result of her meditations was to show her she was directed to be Henrietta’s guardian.  After that, she had no thoughts; travelling beside Chillon, she was sheer sore feeling, as of a body aching for its heart plucked out.  The bitterness of the separation to come between them prophesied a tragedy.  She touched his hand.  It was warm now.

During six days of travels from port to port along the Southern and Western coasts, she joined in the inspection of the English contingent about to be shipped.  They and their chief and her brother were plain to sight, like sample print of a book’s first page, blank sheets for the rest of the volume.  If she might have been one among them, she would have dared the reckless forecast.  Her sensations were those of a bird that has flown into a room, and beats wings against the ceiling and the window-panes.  A close, hard sky, a transparent prison wall, narrowed her powers, mocked her soul.  She spoke little; what she said impressed Chillon’s chief, Owain Wythan was glad to tell her.  The good friend had gone counter to the tide of her breast by showing satisfaction with the prospect that she would take her rightful place in the world.  Her concentrated mind regarded the good friend as a phantom of a man, the world’s echo.  His dead Rebecca would have understood her passion to be her brother’s comrade, her abasement in the staying at home to guard his butterfly.  Owain had never favoured her project; he could not now perceive the special dangers Chillon would be exposed to in her separation from him.  She had no means of explaining what she felt intensely, that dangers, death, were nothing to either of them, if they shared the fate together.