‘I beg,’ he said, and motioned to Chillon the way of welcome into the park, saw the fixed figure, and passed over the unspoken refusal, with a remark to Mr. Wythan:  ‘At Barlings, I presume?’

‘My tent is pitched there,’ was the answer.

‘Good-bye, my brother,’ said Carinthia.

Chillon folded his arms round her.  ’God bless you, dear love.  Let me see you soon.’  He murmured: 

‘You can protect yourself.’

‘Fear nothing for me, dearest.’

She kissed her brother’s cheek.  The strain of her spread fingers on his shoulder signified no dread at her being left behind.

Strangers observing their embrace would have vowed that the pair were brother and sister, and of a notable stock.

’I will walk with you to Croridge again when you send word you are willing to go; and so, good-bye, Owain,’ she said.

She gave her hand; frankly she pressed the Welshman’s, he not a whit behind her in frankness.

Fleetwood had a skimming sense of a drop upon a funny, whirly world.  He kept from giddiness, though the whirl had lasted since he beheld the form of a wild forest girl, dancing, as it struck him now, over an abyss, on the plumed shoot of a stumpy tree.

Ay, and she danced at the ducal schloss;—­she mounted his coach like a witch of the Alps up crags;—­she was beside him pelting to the vale under a leaden Southwester;—­she sat solitary by the fireside in the room of the inn.

Veil it.  He consented to the veil he could not lift.  He had not even power to try, and his heart thumped.

London’s Whitechapel Countess glided before him like a candle in the fog.

He had accused her as the creature destroying Romance.  Was it gold in place of gilding, absolute upper human life that the ridiculous object at his heels over London proposed instead of delirious brilliancies, drunken gallops, poison-syrups,—­puffs of a young man’s vapours?

There was Madge and the donkey basket-trap ahead on the road to the house, bearing proof of the veiled had-been:  signification of a might-have-been.  Why not a possible might-be?  Still the might-be might be.  Looking on this shaven earth and sky of March with the wrathful wind at work, we know that it is not the end:  a day follows for the world.  But looking on those blown black funeral sprays, and the wrinkled chill waters, and the stare of the Esslemont house-windows, it has an appearance of the last lines of our written volume:  dead Finis.  Not death; fouler, the man alive seeing himself stretched helpless for the altering of his deeds; a coffin carrying him; the fatal whiteheaded sacerdotal official intoning his aims on the march to front, the drear craped files of the liveried, salaried mourners over his failure, trooping at his heels.

Frontward was the small lake’s grey water, rearward an avenue of limes.

But the man alive, if but an inch alive, can so take his life in his clutch, that he does alter, cleanse, recast his deeds:—­it is known; priests proclaim it, philosophers admit it.