Lord Feltre seemed to Fleetwood at the moment a more serviceable friend than Gower Woodseer preaching ’Nature’—­an abstraction, not inspiring to the devout poetic or giving us the tongue above our native prosy.  He was raised and refreshed by recollected lines of a Gregorian chant he and Feltre had heard together under the roof of that Alpine monastery.

The Dame collapses.  There is little doubt of her having the world to back her in protest against all fine filmy work of the exploration of a young man’s intricacies or cavities.  Let her not forget the fact she has frequently impressed upon us, that he was ’the very wealthiest nobleman of his time,’ instructive to touch inside as well as out.  He had his share of brains, too.  And also she should be mindful of an alteration of English taste likely of occurrence in the remote posterity she vows she is for addressing after she has exhausted our present hungry generation.  The posterity signified will, it is calculable, it is next to certain, have studied a developed human nature so far as to know the composition of it a not unequal mixture of the philosophic and the romantic, and that credible realism is to be produced solely by an involvement of those two elements.  Or else, she may be sure, her story once out of the mouth, goes off dead as the spirits of a vapour that has performed the stroke of energy.  She holds a surprising event in the history of ’the wealthiest nobleman of his time,’ and she would launch it upon readers unprepared, with the reference to our mysterious and unfathomable nature for an explanation of the stunning crack on the skull.

This may do now.  It will not do ten centuries hence.  For the English, too, are a changeable people in the sight of ulterior Time.

One of the good pieces of work Lord Fleetwood could suppose he had performed was recalled to him near the turning to his mews by the handsome Piccadilly fruit-shop.  He jumped to the pavement, merely to gratify.  Sarah Winch with a word of Madge; and being emotional just then, he spoke of Lady Fleetwood’s attachment to Madge; and he looked at Sarah straight, he dropped his voice:  ’She said, you remember, you were sisters to her.’

Sarah remembered that he had spoken of it before.  Two brilliant drops from the deepest of woman’s ready well stood in her eyes.

He carried the light of them away.  They were such pure jewels of tribute to the Carinthia now seen by him as worshipping souls of devotees offer to their Madonna for her most glorious adornment.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE RED WARNING FROM A SON OF VAPOUR