‘My journey to England was worth all troubles for the meeting Madge,’ she said.  ’I can look with pleasure to that day of my meeting her first—­the day, it was then!’

She stopped.  Madge felt the quivering upward of a whimper to a sob in her breast.  She slipped away.

‘It’s a day that has come round to be repaired, Lady Fleetwood,’ said Gower.  ’If you will.  Will you not?  He has had a blow—­the death of a friend, violent death.  It has broken him.  He wants a month or so in your mountains.  I have thought him hard to deal with; he is humane.  His enormous wealth has been his tempter.  Madge and I will owe him our means of livelihood, enough for cottagers, until I carve my way.  His feelings are much more independent of his rank than those of most noblemen.  He will repeat your kind words to Madge and me; I am sure of it.  He has had heavy burdens; he is young, hardly formed yet.  He needs a helper; I mean, one allied to him.  You forgive me?  I left him with a Catholic lord for comforter, who regards my prescript of the study of Nature, when we’re in grief, as about the same as an offer of a dish of cold boiled greens.  Silver and ivory images are more consoling.  Neither he nor I can offer the right thing for Lord Fleetwood.  It will be found here.  And then your mountains.  More than I, nearly as much as you, he has a poet’s ardour for mountain land.  He and Mr. Wythan would soon learn to understand one another on that head, if not as to management of mines.’

The pleading was crafty, and it was penetrative in the avoidance of stress.  Carinthia shook herself to feel moved.  The endeavour chilled her to a notion that she was but half alive.  She let the question approach her, whether Chillon could pardon Lord Fleetwood.  She, with no idea of benignness, might speak pardon’s word to him, on a late autumn evening years hence, perhaps, or to his friends to-morrow, if he would considerately keep distant.  She was upheld by the thought of her brother’s more honourable likeness to their father, in the certainty of his refusal to speak pardon’s empty word or touch an offending hand, without their father’s warrant for the injury wiped out; and as she had no wish for that to be done, she could anticipate his withholding of the word.

For her brother at wrestle with his fallen fortunes was now the beating heart of Carinthia’s mind.  Her husband was a shadow there.  He did obscure it, and he might annoy, he was unable to set it in motion.  He sat there somewhat like Youth’s apprehension of Death:—­the dark spot seen mistily at times through people’s tears, or visioned as in an ambush beyond the hills; occasionally challenged to stimulate recklessness; oftener overlooked, acknowledged for the undesired remote of life’s conditions, life’s evil, fatal, ill-assorted yoke-fellow; and if it was in his power to burst out of his corner and be terrible to her, she could bring up a force unnamed and unmeasured, that being the blood of her father in her veins.  Having done her utmost to guard her babe, she said her prayers; she stood for peace or the struggle.