not esteemed by him.  Well, of a truth, she—­’Red Hair and Rugged Brows,’ as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with ’Mountain Face to Sun’—­she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly; graceful in the furnace of the trial.  She wore through the critic ordeal his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and was rather better than not withered by it.

On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue, ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly furnace.  And how?—­but that it must have been the naked shining forth of her character, startled to show itself:—­’It is my husband’:—­it must have been love.

The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him in his mastery, snare him in her surrender.  It must have been the veritable passion:  a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very favourite maidens.  Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic.  Though, true, she had not Henrietta’s golden smoothness of beauty.  Henrietta, illumined with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of love.  Would she?  For credulous men she would be golden coin of the currency.  She would not have a particular wild flavour:  charm as of the running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter’s heart with pity.

Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having fought and laid his wilder self.  He might be likened to the doctor’s patient entering the chemist’s shop, with a prescription for a drug of healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who have rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken the intonation of good words.

CHAPTER XXII

A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY

The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as the pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens courtliness to hard attention.

After the names of Admiral Baldwin and ‘the Mr. Woodseer,’ the name of Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington.  It might have been the name of any other place.

‘Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you,’ she said, observing the young earl.  ’I drove down there yesterday.  I saw the lady calling herself Countess of Fleetwood.  By right?  She was a Miss Kirby.’

‘She has the right,’ Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge of musketry.