‘HenriettaKirby-Levellier.’

That was a letter for the husband and lover to receive in a foreign land and be warmed.

The tidings of Carinthia washed him clean of the grimy district where his waxen sister had developed her stubborn insensibility;—­resembling craziness, every perversion of the refinement demanded by young Englishmen of their ladies; and it pacified him with the belief that she was now at rest, the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest as well; his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest.  Chillon had a wife.  Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his knowledge of his wife’s nature.  Carinthia might bear it and harden to flint; Henrietta was a butterfly for the golden rays.  His thoughts, all his energies, were bent on the making of money to supply her need for the pleasure she flew in—­a butterfly’s grub without it.  Accurately so did the husband and lover read his wife—­adoring her the more.

Her letter’s embracing close was costly to them.  It hurried him to the compromise of a debateable business, and he fell into the Austrian Government’s terms for the payment of the inheritance from his father; calculating that—­his sister’s share deducted-money would be in hand to pay pressing debts and enable Henrietta to live unworried by cares until he should have squeezed debts, long due and increasing, out of the miserly old lord, his uncle.  A prospect of supplies for twelve months, counting the hack and carriage Henrietta had always been used to, seemed about as far as it was required to look by the husband hastening homeward to his wife’s call.  Her letter was a call in the night.  Besides, there were his yet untried Inventions.  The new gunpowder testing at Croridge promised to provide Henrietta with many of the luxuries she could have had, and had abandoned for his sake.  The new blasting powder and a destructive shell might build her the palace she deserved.  His uncle was, no doubt, his partner.  If, however, the profits were divided, sufficient wealth was assured.  But his uncle remained a dubious image.  The husband and lover could enfold no positive prospect to suit his wife’s tastes beyond the twelve months.

We have Dame Gossip upon us.

—­One minute let mention be of the excitement over Protestant England when that rumour disseminated, telling of her wealthiest nobleman’s visit to a monastery, up in the peaks and snows; and of his dwelling among the monks, and assisting in all their services day and night, hymning and chanting, uttering not one word for one whole week:  his Papistical friend, Lord Feltre, with him, of course, after Jesuit arts had allured him to that place of torrents and lightnings and canticles and demon echoes, all as though expressly contrived for the horrifying of sinners into penitence and confession and the monkish cowl up to life’s end, not to speak of the abjuration of worldly possessions and donation of them into the