‘At five in the morning?—­don’t sham donkey with me,’ said Gower.

The business looked inclined to be leaky, but which the way for proving himself other than a donkey puzzled Kit:  so much so, that a shove made him partly grateful.  Madge’s clever countermove had stunned his judgement.  He was besides acting subordinate to his patron’s paymaster; and by the luck of it, no voice of woman interposed.  The countess and her maid stood by like a disinterested couple.  Why be suspicious, if he was to keep the countess, in sight?  She was a nice lady, and he preferred her good opinion.  She was brave, and he did her homage.  It might be, my lord had got himself round to the idea of thanking her for saving his nob that night, and his way was to send and have her up, to tell her he forgave her, after the style of lords.  Gower pricked into him by saying aside:  ‘Mad, I suppose, in case of a noise?’ And he could not answer quite manfully, lost his eyes and coloured.  Neighbours might have required an explanation of shrieks, he confessed.  Men have sometimes to do nasty work for their patrons.

They were afoot, walking at Carinthia’s pace before half-past seven.  She would not hear of any conveyance.  She was cheerful, and, as it was pitiful to see, enjoyed her walk.  Hearing of her brother’s departure for the Austrian capital, she sparkled.  Her snatches of speech were short flights out of the meditation possessing her.  Gower noticed her easier English, that came home to the perpetual student he was.  She made use of some of his father’s words, and had assimilated them mentally besides appropriating them:  the verbalizing of ‘purpose,’ then peculiar to his father, for example.  She said, in reply to a hint from him:  ’If my lord will allow me an interview, I purpose to be obedient.’  No one could imagine of her that she spoke broken-spiritedly.  Her obedience was to a higher than a mortal lord:  and Gower was touched to the quick through the use of the word.

Contrasting her with Countess Livia and her cousin, the earl might think her inferior on the one small, square compartment called by them the world; but she carried the promise of growth, a character in expansion, and she had at least natural grace, a deerlike step.  Although her picturesqueness did not swarm on him with images illuminating night, subduing day, like the Countess Livia’s, it was marked, it could tower and intermittently eclipse; and it was of the uplifting and healing kind by comparison, not a delicious balefulness.

The bigger houses, larger shops, austere streets of private residences, were observed by the recent inhabitant of Whitechapel.

‘My lord lives in a square,’ she said.

‘We shall soon be there now,’ he encouraged her, doubtful though the issue appeared.

’It is a summer morning for the Ortler, the Gross-Glockner, the Venediger,—­all our Alps, Mr. Woodseer.’

‘If we could fly!’