Suspicions were not of the brood Carinthia’s bosom harboured.  Suspicion of Chillon’s wife Carinthia could not feel.  An uncaptained vessel in the winds on high seas was imagined without a picturing of it.  The apparition of Ives, if it was he, would not fit with any conjecture.  She sent a warning to Madge, and at the same time named the girl’s wedding day for her; pained in doing it.  She had given the dear girl her word that she would be present at this of all marriages.  But a day or two days or more would have to be spent away from Chillon; and her hunger for every hour beside her brother confessed to the war going on within her, as to which was her holier duty, the one on the line of her inclinations, or that one pointing to luxury-choice between a battle-horse and a cushioned-chair; between companionship with her glorious brother facing death, and submission to a weak young nobleman claiming his husband’s rights over her.  She had submitted, had forgotten his icy strangeness, had thought him love; and hers was a breast for love, it was owned by the sobbing rise of her breast at the thought.  And she might submit again—­in honour? scorning the husband?  Chillon scorned him.  Yet Chillon left the decision to her, specified his excuses.  And Henrietta and Owain, Lady Arpington, Gower Woodseer, all the world—­Carinthia shuddered at the world’s blank eye on what it directs for the acquiescence of the woman.  That shred of herself she would become, she felt herself becoming it when the view of her career beside her brother waned.  The dead Rebecca living in her heart was the only soul among her friends whose voice was her own against the world’s.

But there came a turn where she and Rebecca separated.  Rebecca’s insurgent wishes taking shape of prophecy, robbed her of her friend Owain, to present her an impossible object, that her mind could not compass or figure.  She bade Rebecca rest and let her keep the fancy of Owain as her good ghost of a sun in the mist of a frosty morning; sweeter to her than an image of love, though it were the very love, the love of maidens’ dreams, bursting the bud of romance, issuing its flower.  Delusive love drove away with a credulous maiden, under an English heaven, on a coach and four, from a windy hill-top, to a crash below, and a stunned recovery in the street of small shops, mud, rain, gloom, language like musket-fire and the wailing wounded.

No regrets, her father had said; they unman the heart we want for to-morrow.  She kept her look forward at the dead wall Chillon had thrown up.  He did not reject her company; his prospect of it had clouded; and there were allusions to Henrietta’s loneliness.  ’His Carin could do her service by staying, if she decided that way.’  Her enthusiasm dropped to the level of life’s common ground.  With her sustainment gone, she beheld herself a titled doll, and had sternly to shut her eyes on the behind scenes, bar any shadowy approaches of womanly softness; thinking her father’s daughter dishonoured in the submissive wife of the weak young nobleman Chillon despised as below the title of man.