He cast his bitter cud aside.  ’My man should have arrived.  Lady Fleetwood at home?’

Gower spoke of her having gone to Croridge in the morning.

‘Has she taken the child?’

‘She has, yes.  For the air of the heights.’

’For greater security.  Lady Arpington praises the thoughtful mother.  I rather expected to see the child.’

‘They can’t be much later,’ Gower supposed.

‘You don’t feel your long separation from “the object"?’

Letting him have his cushion for pins, Gower said ’It needs all my philosophy: 

He was pricked and probed for the next five minutes; not bad rallying, the earl could be smart when he smarted.  Then they descended the terrace to meet Lady Fleetwood driving her pony-trap.  She gave a brief single nod to the salute of her lord, quite in the town-lady’s manner, surprisingly.

CHAPTER XLI

IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM THEM

The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last.  Fleetwood went, like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in the back turned to his wife’s along the corridor, that our ordinary comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct.  She was Arctic, and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put between them.  A removal of either of them from life—­or from ’the act of breathing,’ as Gower Woodseer’s contempt of the talk about death would call it—­was an imaginable way of making it a wider division.  Ambrose Mallard was far enough from his fatal lady now—­farther than the Poles asunder.  Ambrose, if the clergy will allow him, has found his peace. .  But the road and the means he chose were a madman’s.

The blotting of our character, to close our troubles, is the final proof of our being ‘sons of vapour,’ according to Gower Woodseer’s heartless term for poor Ambrose and the lot.  They have their souls; and above philosophy, ‘natural’ or unnatural, they may find a shelter.  They can show in their desperation that they are made of blood, as philosophers rather fail of doing.  An insignificant brainless creature like Feltre had wits, by the aid of his religion, to help or be charitable to his fellows, particularly the sinners, in the crisis of life, surpassing any philosopher’s.

Information of her ladyship’s having inspected the apartments, to see to the minutest of his customary luxuries, cut at him all round.  His valet had it from the footmen and maids; and their speaking of it meant a liking for their mistress; and that liking, added to her official solicitude on his behalf, touched a soft place in him and blew an icy wind; he was frozen where he was warmed.  Here was evidence of her intending the division to be a fixed gap.  She had entered this room and looked about her.  He was here to feel her presence in her absence.