‘Does Lord Fleetwood speak of coming here?’ she said.

‘To-morrow.’

‘I go to Croridge to-morrow.’

‘Your ladyship returns?’

’Yes, I return Mr. Gower, you have fifty minutes before you dress for dinner.’

He thought only of the exceeding charity of the intimation; and he may be excused for his not seeing the feminine full answer it was, in an implied, unmeditated contrast.  He went gladly to find his new comrade, his flower among grass-blades, the wonderful creature astonishing him and surcharging his world by setting her face at him, opening her breast to him, breathing a young man’s word of words from a woman’s mouth.  His flower among grass-blades for a head looking studiously down, she was his fountain of wisdom as well, in the assurance she gave him of the wisdom of his choice.

But Madge had put up the ‘prize-fighter’s lass,’ by way of dolly defence, to cover her amazed confusion when the proposal of this well-liked gentleman to a girl such as she sounded churchy.  He knocked it over easily; it left, however, a bee at his ear and an itch to transfer the buzzer’s attentions and tease his darling; for she had betrayed herself as right good game.  Nor is there happier promise of life-long domestic enlivenment for a prescient man of Letters than he has in the contemplation of a pretty face showing the sensitiveness to the sting, which is not allowed to poison her temper, and is short of fetching tears.  The dear innocent girl gave this pleasing promise; moreover, she could be twisted-to laugh at herself, just a little.  Now, the young woman who can do that has already jumped the hedge into the highroad of philosophy, and may become a philosopher’s mate in its by-ways, where the minute discoveries are the notable treasures.

They had their ramble, agreeable to both, despite the admonitory dose administered to one of them.  They might have been espied at a point or two from across the parkpalings; their laughter would have caught an outside pedestrian’s hearing.  Whatever the case, Owain Wythan, riding down off Croridge, big with news of her brother for the countess, dined at her table, and walking up the lane to the Esslemont Arms on a moonless night, to mount his horse, pitched against an active and, as it was deemed by Gower’s observation of his eyes, a scientific fist.  The design to black them finely was attributable to the dyeing accuracy of the stroke.  A single blow had done it.  Mr. Wythan’s watch and purse were untouched; and a second look at the swollen blind peepers led Gower to surmise that they were, in the calculation of the striker, his own.

He walked next day to the Royal Sovereign inn.  There he came upon the earl driving his phaeton.  Fleetwood jumped down, and Gower told of the mysterious incident, as the chief thing he had to tell, not rendering it so mysterious in his narrative style.  He had the art of indicating darkly.

‘Ines, you mean?’ Fleetwood cried, and he appeared as nauseated and perplexed as he felt.  Why should Ines assault Mr. Wythan?  It happened that the pugilist’s patron had, within the last fifteen minutes, driven past a certain thirty-acre meadow, sight of which on his way to Carinthia had stirred him.  He had even then an idea of his old deeds dogging him to bind him, every one of them, the smallest.