He thought the Catholic lord had gone a step or two to catch an eel.

Fleetwood was looking on the backward of his days, beholding a melancholy sunset, with a grimace in it.

’Lord Feltre might show you the “leanness of Philosophy";—­you would learn from hearing him:—­“an old gnawed bone for the dog that chooses to be no better than a dog."’

‘The vertiginous roast haunch is recommended,’ Gower said.

’See a higher than your own head, good sir.  But, hang the man! he manages to hit on the thing he wants.’  Fleetwood set his face at Gower with cutting heartiness.  ’In love, you say, and Madge:  and mean it to be the holy business!  Well, poor old Chummy always gave you credit for knowing how to play your game.  She has given proof she ’s a good girl.  I don’t see why it shouldn’t end well.  That attack on the Welshman’s the bad lookout.  Explained, if you like, but women’s impressions won’t get explained away.  We must down on our knees or they.  Her ladyship attentive at all to affairs of the house?’

‘Every day with Queeney; at intervals with Leddings.’

’Excellent!  You speak like a fellow recording the devout observances of a great dame with her minor and superior, ecclesiastical comforters.  Regular at church?’

‘Her ladyship goes.’

’A woman without religion, Gower Woodseer, is a weed on the water, or she’s hard as nails.  We shall see.  Generally, Madge and the youngster parade the park at this hour.  I drive round to the stables.  Go in and offer your version of that rascally dog’s trick.  It seems the nearest we can come at.  He’s a sot, and drunken dogs ’ll do anything.  I’ve had him on my hands, and I’ve got the stain of him.’

They trotted through Esslemont Park gates.  ’I’ve got that place, Calesford, on my hands, too,’ the earl said, suddenly moved to a liking for his Kentish home.

He and Gower were struck by a common thought of the extraordinary burdens his indulgence in impulses drew upon him.  Present circumstances pictured to Gower the opposing weighed and matured good reason for his choosing Madge, and he complimented himself in his pity for the earl.  But Fleetwood, as he reviewed a body of acquaintances perfectly free from the wretched run in harness, though they had their fits and their whims, was pushed to the conclusion that fatalism marked his particular course through life.  He could not hint at such an idea to the unsympathetic fellow, or rather, the burly antagonist to anything of the sort, beside him.  Lord Feltre would have understood and appreciated it instantly.  Where is aid to be had if we have the Fates against us?  Feltre knew the Power, he said; was an example of ‘the efficacy of supplications’; he had been ‘fatally driven to find the Power,’ and had found it—­on the road to Rome, of course:  not a delectable road for an English nobleman, except that the noise of another convert in pilgrimage on it would deal our English world a lively smack, the very stroke that heavy body wants.  But the figure of a ‘monastic man of fashion’ was antipathetic to the earl, and he flouted an English Protestant mass merely because of his being highly individual, and therefore revolutionary for the minority.