disgust and partly to parade his contempt of a lucrative dependency—­than he had felt for the countess.  No wonder his diction was poor.  It was a sample of limp thinness; a sort of tongue of a Master Slender:—­flavourless, unsatisfactory, considering its object:  measured to be condemned by its poor achievement.  He had nevertheless a heart to feel for the dear lady, and heat the pleading for her, especially when it ran to its object, as along a shaft of the sun-rays, from the passionate devotedness of that girl Madge.

He brooded over it till it was like a fire beneath him to drive him from his bed and across the turfy roller of the hill to the Wythans’, in the front of an autumnal sunrise—­grand where the country is shorn of surface decoration, as here and there we find some unadorned human creature, whose bosom bears the ball of warmth.

CHAPTER XXXII

IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD FATHER’S LESSONS

Seated at his breakfast-table, the earl saw Gower stride in, and could have wagered he knew the destination of the fellow’s morning walk.  It concerned him little; he would be leaving the castle in less than an hour.  She might choose to come or choose to keep away.  The whims of animals do not affect men unless they are professionally tamers.  Petty domestic dissensions are besides poor webs to the man pulling singlehanded at ropes with his revolted miners.  On the topic of wages, too, he was Gower’s master, and could hold forth:  by which he taught himself to feel that practical affairs are the proper business of men, women and infants being remotely secondary; the picturesque and poetry, consequently, sheer nonsense.

‘I suppose your waiting here is useless, to quote you,’ he said.  ’The countess can decide now to remain, if she pleases.  Drive with me to Cardiff—­I miss you if you ’re absent a week.  Or is it legs?  Drop me a line of your stages on the road, and don’t loiter much.’

Gower spoke of starting his legs next day, if he had to do the journey alone:  and he clouded the yacht for Fleetwood with talk of the Wye and the Usk, Hereford and the Malvern Hills elliptical over the plains.

‘Yes,’ the earl acquiesced jealously; ’we ought to have seen—­tramped every foot of our own country.  That yacht of mine, there she is, and I said I would board her and have a fly with half a dozen fellows round the Scottish isles.  We’re never free to do as we like.’

‘Legs are the only things that have a taste of freedom,’ said Gower.

They strolled down to Howell Edwards’ office at nine, Kit Ines beside the luggage cart to the rear.

Around the office and along to the street of the cottages crowds were chattering, gesticulating; Ines fancied the foreign jabberers inclined to threaten.  Howell Edwards at the door of his office watched them calculatingly.  The lord of their destinies passed in with him, leaving Gower to study the features of the men, and Ines to reckon the chance of a fray.