It had the appearance of a temptation; and he was not tempted, though he admired; his thought being, Husband of the thing!

But he admired.  That condition awakened his unsatisfied past days to desire positive proof of her worthlessness.  The past days writhed in him.  The present were loveless, entirely cold.  He had not even the wish to press her hand.  The market held beautiful women of a like description.  He wished simply to see her proved the thing he read her to be:  and not proved as such by himself.  He was unable to summon or imagine emotion enough for him to simulate the forms by which fair women are wooed to their perdition.  For all he cared, any man on earth might try, succeed or fail, as long as he had visual assurance that she coveted, a slave to the pleasures commanded by the wealth once disdained by her.  Till that time, he could not feel himself perfectly free.

Dame Gossip prefers to ejaculate.  Young men are mysteries! and bowl us onward.  No one ever did comprehend the Earl of Fleetwood, she says:  he was bad, he was good; he was whimsical and stedfast; a splendid figure, a mark for ridicule; romantic and a close arithmetician; often a devil, sometimes the humanest of creatures.

In fine, he was a millionaire nobleman, owning to a considerable infusion of Welsh blood in the composition of him.  Now, to the Cymry and to the pure Kelt, the past is at their elbows continually.  The past of their lives has lost neither face nor voice behind the shroud; nor are the passions of the flesh, nor is the animate soul, wanting to it.  Other races forfeit infancy, forfeit youth and manhood with their progression to the wisdom age may bestow.  These have each stage always alive, quick at a word, a scent, a sound, to conjure up scenes, in spirit and in flame.  Historically, they still march with Cadwallader, with Llewellyn, with Glendower; sing with Aneurin, Taliesin, old Llywarch:  individually, they are in the heart of the injury done them thirty years back or thrilling to the glorious deed which strikes an empty buckler for most of the sons of Time.  An old sea rises in them, rolling no phantom billows to break to spray against existing rocks of the shore.  That is why, and even if they have a dose of the Teuton in them, they have often to feel themselves exiles when still in amicable community among the preponderating Saxon English.

Add to the single differentiation enormous wealth—­we convulse the excellent Dame by terming it a chained hurricane, to launch in foul blasts or beneficent showers, according to the moods during youth—­and the composite Lord Fleetwood comes nearer into our focus.  Dame Gossip, with her jigging to be at the butterwoman’s trot, when she is not violently interrupting, would suffer just punishment were we to digress upon the morality of a young man’s legal possession of enormous wealth as well.