She stood unshadowed.  ‘We have come to bid you adieu, my lord,’ she said, and no trouble of the bosom shook her mellow tones.  Her face was not the chalk-quarry or the rosed rock; it was oddly individual, and, in a way, alluring, with some gentle contraction of her eyelids.  But evidently she stood in full repose, mistress of herself.

Upon him, it appeared, the whole sensibility of the situation was to be thrown.  He hardened.

‘We have had to settle business here,’ he said, speaking resonantly, to cover his gazing discomposedly, all but furtively.

The child was shown, still asleep.  A cunning infant not a cry in him to excuse a father for preferring concord or silence or the bachelor’s exemption.

‘He is a strong boy,’ the mother said.  ’Our doctor promises he will ride over all the illnesses.’

Fleetwood’s answer set off with an alarum of the throat, and dwindled to ’We ‘ll hope so.  Seems to sleep well.’

She had her rocky brows.  They were not barren crags, and her shape was Nature’s ripeness, it was acknowledged:  She stood like a lance in air-rather like an Amazon schooled by Athene, one might imagine.  Hues of some going or coming flush hinted the magical trick of her visage.  She spoke in modest manner, or it might be indifferently, without a flaunting of either.

’I wish to consult you, my lord.  He is not baptized.  His Christian names?’

‘I have no choice.’

‘I should wish him to bear one of my brother’s names.’

‘I have no knowledge of your brother’s names.’

‘Chillon is one.’

‘Ah!  Is it, should you think, suitable to our climate?’

‘Another name of my brother’s is John.’

‘Bull.’  The loutish derision passed her and rebounded on him.  ’That would be quite at home.’

‘You will allow one of your own names, my lord?’

’Oh, certainly, if you desire it, choose.  There are four names you will find in a book of the Peerage or Directory or so.  Up at the castle—­or you might have written:—­better than these questions on the public road.  I don’t demur.  Let it be as you like.’

‘I write empty letters to tell what I much want,’ Carinthia said.

‘You have only to write your plain request.’

‘If, now I see you, I may speak another request, my lord.’

‘Pray,’ he said, with courteous patience, and stepped forward down to the street of the miners’ cottages.  She could there speak out-bawl the request, if it suited her to do so.

On the point of speaking, she gazed round.

‘Perfectly safe! no harm possible,’ said he, fretful under the burden of this her maniacal maternal anxiety.

’The men are all right, they would not hurt a child.  What can rationally be suspected!’

‘I know the men; they love their children,’ she replied.  ’I think my child would be precious to them.  Mr. Woodseer and Mr. Edwards and Madge are there.’