‘Dear me!’ quoth Fleetwood, and he murmured politely and cursorily, attentive to his coachman business.  She had a voice that clove the noise of the wheels, and she had a desire to talk—­that was evident.  Talk of her father set her prattling.  It became clear also to his not dishonest, his impressionable mind, that her baby English might be natural.  Or she was mildly playing on it, to give herself an air.

He had no remembrance of such baby English at Baden.  There, however, she was in a state of enthusiasm—­the sort of illuminated transparency they show at the end of fireworks.  Mention of her old scapegrace of a father lit her up again.  The girl there and the girl here were no doubt the same.  It could not be said that she had duped him; he had done it for himself—­acted on by a particular agency.  This creature had not the capacity to dupe.  He had armed a bluntwitted young woman with his idiocy, and she had dealt the stroke; different in scarce a degree by nature from other young women of prey.

But her look at times, and now and then her voice, gave sign that she counted on befooling him as well, to reconcile him to his bondage.  The calculation was excessive.  No woman had done it yet.  Idiocy plunged him the step which reawakened understanding; and to keep his whole mind alert on guard against any sort of satisfaction with his bargain, he frankly referred to the cause.  Not female arts, but nature’s impulses, it was his passion for the wondrous in the look of a woman’s face, the new morning of the idea of women in the look, and the peep into imaginary novel character, did the trick of enslaving him.  Call it idiocy.  Such it was.  Once acknowledged, it is not likely to recur.  An implacable reason sits in its place, with a keen blade for efforts to carry the imposture further afield or make it agreeable.  Yet, after giving his word to Lord Levellier, he had prodded himself to think the burden of this wild young woman might be absurdly tolerable and a laugh at the world.

A solicitude for the animal was marked by his inquiry ’You are not hungry yet?’

‘Oh no, not yet,’ said she, oddly enlivened.

They had a hamper and were independent of stoppages for provision, he informed her.  What more delightful? cried her look, seeing the first mid-day’s rest and meal with Chillon on the walk over the mountain from their empty home.

She could get up enthusiasm for a stocked hamper!  And when told of some business that drew him to a meadow they were nearing, she said she would be glad to help, if she could.  ‘I learn quickly, I know.’

His head acquiesced.  The daughter of the Old Buccaneer might learn the business quickly, perhaps; a singularly cutting smile was on his tight lips, in memory of a desire he had as a boy to join hands with an Amazonian damsel and be out over the world for adventures, comrade and bride as one.  Here the creature sat.  Life is the burlesque of young dreams; or they precipitate us on the roar and grin of a recognized beast world.