look, much like the skies opening high aloof on a wreck of storm.  Her reddish hair-chestnut, if you will—­let fall a skein over one of the rugged brows, and softened the ruggedness by making it wilder, as if a great bird were winging across a shoulder of the mountain ridges.  Conceived of the mountains, built in their image, the face partook alternately of mountain terror or splendour; wholly, he remembered, of the splendour when her blood ran warm.  No longer the chalk-quarry face,—­its paleness now was that of night Alps beneath a moon chasing the shadows.

She might be casting her spells again.

‘You remember I told you,’ he said, ’I have given my word—­I don’t break it—­to be at a Ball.  Your uncle was urgent to have the ceremony over.  These clashes occur.  The people here—­I have spoken of that:  people of good repute for attention to guests.  I am uncertain of the time . . . we have all to learn to wait.  So then, good-bye till we meet.’

He was experiencing a novel nip of torment, of just the degree which takes a partial appeasement from the inflicting of it, and calls up a loathed compassion.  She might have been in his arms for a step, though she would not have been the better loved.

He was allowed his escape, bearing with him enough of husband to execrate another enslaving pledge of his word, that begat a frenzy to wreak some caresses on the creature’s intolerably haunting image.  Of course, he could not return to her.  How would she receive him?  There was no salt in the thought of it; she was too submissive.

However, there would be fun with Chummy Potts on the drive to Canleys; fun with Rufus Abrane at Mrs. Cowper Quillett’s; and with the Countess Livia, smothered, struggling, fighting for life with the title of Dowager.  A desire for unbridled fun had hold of any amount of it, to excess in any direction.  And though this cloud as a dry tongue after much wine craves water, glimpses of his tramp’s walk with a fellow tramp on a different road, enjoying strangely healthy vagabond sensations and vast ideas; brought the vagrant philosopher refreshfully to his mind:  chiefly for the reason that while in Woodseer’s company he had hardly suffered a stroke of pain from the thought of Henrietta.  She was now a married woman, he was a married man by the register.  Stronger proof of the maddest of worlds could not be furnished.

Sane in so mad a world, a man is your flabby citizen among outlaws, good for plucking.  Fun, at any cost, is the one object worth a shot in such a world.  And the fun is not to stop.  If it does, we are likely to be got hold of, and lugged away to the altar—­the terminus.  That foul disaster has happened, through our having temporarily yielded to a fit of the dumps and treated a mad world’s lunatic issue with some seriousness.  But fun shall be had with the aid of His Highness below.  The madder the world, the madder the fun.  And the mixing in it of another element, which it has to beguile us—­romance—­is not at all bad cookery.  Poetic romance is delusion—­a tale of a Corsair; a poet’s brain, a bottle of gin, and a theatrical wardrobe.  Comic romance is about us everywhere, alive for the tapping.