‘Adieu, dear Mrs. Carthew.  A day of glory it is to-day.’  She must actually have had it in her sight as a day of glory:  and it was a day of the clouds off our rainy quarter, similar in every way to the day of her stepping on English soil and saying:  ‘It is a dark land.’  For the heart is truly declared to be our colourist.  A day having the gale in its breast, sweeping the whole country and bending the trees for the twigs to hiss like spray of the billows around our island, was a day of golden splendour to the young bride of the Earl of Fleetwood, though he scarcely addressed one syllable to her, and they sat side by side all but dumb, he like a coachman driving an unknown lady fare, on a morning after a night when his wife’s tongue may have soured him for the sex.

CHAPTER XIV

A PENDANT OF THE FOREGOING

Mention has been omitted or forgotten by the worthy Dame, in her vagrant fowl’s treatment of a story she cannot incubate, will not relinquish, and may ultimately addle, that the bridegroom, after walking with a disengaged arm from the little village church at Croridge to his coach and four at the cross of the roads to Lekkatts and the lowland, abruptly, and as one pursuing a deferential line of conduct he had prescribed to himself, asked his bride, what seat she would prefer.

He shouted:  ‘Ives!’

A person inside the coach appeared to be effectually roused.

The glass of the window dropped.  The head of a man emerged.  It was the head of one of the bargefaced men of the British Isles, broad, and battered flattish, with sentinel eyes.

In an instant the heavy-headed but not ill-looking fellow was nimble and jumped from the coach.

‘Napping, my lord,’ he said.

Heavy though the look of him might be, his feet were light; they flipped a bar of a hornpipe at a touch of the ground.  Perhaps they were allowed to go with their instinct for the dance, that his master should have a sample of his wakefulness.  He quenched a smirk and stood to take orders; clad in a flat blue cap, a brown overcoat, and knee-breeches, as the temporary bustle of his legs had revealed.

Fleet-wood heard the young lady say:  ’I would choose, if you please, to sit beside you.’

He gave a nod of enforced assent, glancing at the vacated box.

The man inquired:  ‘A knee and a back for the lady to mount up, my lord?’

‘In!’ was the smart command to him; and he popped in with the agility of his popping out.

Then Carinthia made reverence to the grey lean figure of her uncle and kissed Mrs. Carthew.  She needed no help to mount the coach.  Fleetwood’s arm was rigidly extended, and he did not visibly wince when this foreign girl sprang to the first hand-grip on the coach and said:  ’No, my husband, I can do it’; unaided,’ was implied.

Her stride from the axle of the wheel to the step higher would have been a graceful spectacle on Alpine crags.