However, that was preliminary.  He and Howell Edwards would dine and wrangle it out.  The earl knew himself a hot disputant after dinner.  Incidentally he heard of Lady Fleetwood as a guest of Mrs. Wythan; and the circumstance was injurious to him because he stood against Mr. Wythan’s pampering system with his men.

Ines up at the castle smelt of beer, and his eyelids were sottish.  Nothing to do tries the virtue of the best.  He sought his excuse in a heavy lamentation over my lady’s unjust suspicion of him,—­a known man of honour, though he did serve his paytron.

The cause of Lady Fleetwood’s absence was exposed to her outraged lord, who had sent the man purely to protect her at this castle, where she insisted on staying.  The suspicion cast on the dreary lusher was the wife’s wild shot at her husband.  One could understand a silly woman’s passing terror.  Her acting under the dictate of it struck the husband’s ribbed breast as a positive clap of hostilities between them across a chasm.

His previous placable mood was immediately conceived by him to have been one of his fits of generosity; a step to a frightful dutiful embrace of an almost repulsive object.  He flung the thought of her back on her Whitechapel.  She returned from that place with smiles, dressed in a laundry white with a sprinkle of smuts, appearing to him as an adversary armed and able to strike.  There was a blow, for he chewed resentments; and these were goaded by a remembered shyness of meeting her eyes when he rounded up the slope of the hill, in view of his castle, where he supposed she would be awaiting ‘my husband.’  The silence of her absence was lively mockery of that anticipation.

Gower came on him sauntering about the grounds.

‘You’re not very successful down here,’ Fleetwood said, without greeting.

‘The countess likes the air of this country,’ said Gower, evasively, impertinently, and pointlessly; offensively to the despot employing him to be either subservient or smart.

‘I wish her to leave it.’

‘She wishes to see you first.’

‘She takes queer measures.  I start to-morrow for my yacht at Cardiff.’  There the matter ended; for Fleetwood fell to talking of the mines.  At dinner and after dinner it was the topic, and after Howell Edwards had departed.

When the man who has a heart will talk of nothing but what concerns his interests, and the heart is hurt, it may be perceived by a cognizant friend, that this is his proud mute way of petitioning to have the tenderer subject broached.  Gower was sure of the heart, armoured or bandaged though it was,—­a haunt of evil spirits as well,—­and he began:  ’Now to speak of me half a minute.  You cajoled me out of my Surrey room, where I was writing, in the vein . . .’

‘I’ve had the scene before me!’ the earl interposed.  ’Juniper dells and that tree of the flashing leaf, and that dear old boy, your father, young as you and me, and saying love of Nature gives us eternal youth.  On with you.’