‘Will she be expecting you to answer, Rowsley?’

‘Will that forked tongue cease hissing!’ he shouted, in the agony of a strong man convulsed both to render and conceal the terrible, shameful, unexampled gush of tears.

Lady Charlotte beheld her bleeding giant.  She would rather have seen the brother of her love grimace in woman’s manner than let loose those rolling big drops down the face of a rock.  The big sob shook him, and she was shaken to the dust by the sight.  Now she was advised by her deep affection for her brother to sit patient and dumb, behind shaded eyes:  praising in her heart the incomparable force of the man’s love of the woman contrasted with the puling inclinations of the woman for the man.

Neither opened mouth when they separated.  She pressed and kissed a large nerveless hand.  Lord Ormont stood up to bow her forth.  His ruddied skin had gone to pallor resembling the berg of ice on the edge of Arctic seas, when sunlight has fallen away from it.

CHAPTER XXX

CONCLUSION

The peaceful little home on the solitary sandy shore was assailed, unwarned, beneath a quiet sky, some hours later, by a whirlwind, a dust-storm, and rattling volleys.  Miss Vincent’s discovery, in the past school-days, of Selina Collett’s ’wicked complicity in a clandestine correspondence’ had memorably chastened the girl, who vowed at the time when her schoolmistress, using the rod of Johnsonian English for the purpose, exposed the depravity of her sinfulness, that she would never again be guilty of a like offence.  Her dear and lovely Countess of Ormont, for whom she then uncomplainingly suffered, who deigned now to call her friend, had spoken the kind good-bye, and left the house after Mr. Weyburn’s departure that same day; she, of course, to post by Harwich to London; he to sail by packet from the port of Harwich for Flushing.  The card of an unknown lady, a great lady, the Lady Charlotte Eglett, was handed to her mother at eight o’clock in the evening.

Lady Charlotte was introduced to the innocent country couple; the mother knitting, the daughter studying a book of the botany of the Swiss Alps, dreaming a distant day’s journey over historic lands of various hues to the unimaginable spectacle of earth’s grandeur.  Her visit lasted fifteen minutes.  From the moment of her entry, the room was in such turmoil as may be seen where a water-mill wheel’s paddles are suddenly set rounding to pour streams of foam on the smooth pool below.  A relentless catechism bewildered their hearing.  Mrs. Collett attempted an opposition of dignity to those vehement attacks for answers.  It was flooded and rolled over.  She was put upon her honour to reply positively to positive questions:  whether the Countess of Ormont was in this house at present; whether the Countess of Ormont left the house alone or in company; whether a gentleman had come to the house during the stay of the Countess of Ormont; whether Lady Ormont had left the neighbourhood; the exact time of the day when she quitted the house, and the stated point of her destination.