to roses may whirl away with their handsome dragoons!  A pang from them is a thing to be ashamed of.  And there are men who trot about whining with it!  But a Carinthia makes pain honourable.  You have done what I thought impossible—­fused a woman’s face and grand scenery, to make them inseparable.  She might be wicked for me.  I should see a bright rim round hatred of her!—­the rock you describe.  I could endure horrors and not annihilate her!  I should think her sacred.’

Woodseer turned about to have a look at the man who was even quicker than he at realizing a person from a hint of description, and almost insanely extravagant in the pitch of the things he uttered to a stranger.  For himself, he was open with everybody, his philosophy not allowing that strangers existed on earth.  But the presence of a lord brought the conventional world to his feelings, though at the same time the title seemed to sanction the exceptional abruptness and wildness of this lord.  As for suspecting him to be mad, it would have been a common idea:  no stretching of speech or overstepping of social rules could waken a suspicion so spiritless in Woodseer.

He said:  ’I can tell you I met her and she lives.  I could as soon swim in that torrent or leap the mountain as repeat what she spoke, or sketch a feature of her.  She goes into the blood, she is a new idea of women.  She has the face that would tempt a gypsy to evil tellings.  I could think of it as a history written in a line:  Carinthia, Saint and Martyr!  As for comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire.’

‘I have had that—­I have thought that,’ said Lord Fleetwood.  ’Go on; talk of her, pray; without comparisons.  I detest them.  How did you meet her?  What made you part?  Where is she now?  I have no wish to find her, but I want thoroughly to believe in her.’

Another than Woodseer would have perceived the young lord’s malady.  Here was one bitten by the serpent of love, and athirst for an image of the sex to serve for the cooling herb, as youth will be.  Woodseer put it down to a curious imaginative fellowship with himself.  He forgot the lord, and supposed he had found his own likeness, less gifted in speech.  After talking of Carinthia more and more in the abstract, he fell upon his discovery of the Great Secret of life, against which his hearer struggled for a time, though that was cooling to him too; but ultimately there was no resistance, and so deep did they sink into the idea of pure contemplation, that the idea of woman seemed to have become a part of it.  No stronger proof of their aethereal conversational earnestness could be offered.  A locality was given to the Great Secret, and of course it was the place where the most powerful recent impression had been stamped on the mind of the discoverer:  the shadowy valley rolling from the slate-rock.  Woodseer was too artistic a dreamer to present the passing vision of Carinthia with any associates there.  She passed:  the solitude accepted her and lost her; and it was the richer for the one swift gleam:  she brought no trouble, she left no regrets; she was the ghost of the rocky obscurity.  But now remembering her mountain carol, he chanced to speak of her as a girl.