‘But you’ve nothing to go by,’ he said.  ’Why guess at this rascal more than another?’

Gower quoted Mrs. Rundles and the ostler for witnesses to Kit’s visit yesterday to the Royal Sovereign, though Kit shunned the bar of the Esslemont Arms.

’I guess pretty clearly, because I suspect he was hanging about and saw me and Madge together.’

’Consolations for failures in town?—­by the way, you are complimented, and I don’t think you deserved it.  However, there was just the chance to stop a run to perdition.  But, Madge?  Madge?  I’d swear to the girl!’

‘Not so hard as I,’ said Gower, and spoke of the oath to come between the girl and him.

Fleetwood’s dive into the girl’s eyes drew her before him.  He checked a spirt of exclamations.

‘You fancy the brute had a crack for revenge and mistook his man?’

‘That’s what I want her ladyship to know,’ said Gower.

‘How could you let her hear of it?’

‘Nothing can be concealed from her.’

The earl was impressionable to the remark, in his disgust at the incident.  It added a touch of a new kind of power to her image.

‘She’s aware of my coming?’

‘To-day or to-morrow.’

They scaled the phaeton and drove.

‘You undervalue Lord Feltre.  You avoid your adversaries,’ Fleetwood now rebuked his hearer.  ’It ’s an easy way to have the pull of them in your own mind.  You might learn from him.  He’s willing for controversy.  Nature-worship—­or “aboriginal genuflexion,” he calls it; Anglicanism, Methodism; he stands to engage them.  It can’t be doubted, that in days of trouble he has a faith “stout as a rock, with an oracle in it,” as he says; and he’s right, “men who go into battle require a rock to back them or a staff to lean on.”  You have your “secret,” you think; as far as I can see, it’s to keep you from going into any form of battle.’

The new influence at work on the young nobleman was evident, if only in the language used.

Gower answered mildly:  ’That can hardly be said of a man who’s going to marry.’

‘Perhaps not.  Lady Fleetwood is aware?’

‘Lady Fleetwood does me the honour to approve my choice.’

‘You mean, you’re dead on to it with this girl?’

‘For a year or more.’

‘Fond of her?’

‘All my heart.’

‘In love!’

’Yes, in love.  The proof of it is, I ’ve asked her now I can support her as a cottager leaning on the Three Per Cents.’

’Well, it helps you to a human kind of talk.  It carries out your theories.  I never disbelieved in your honesty.  The wisdom’s another matter.  Did you ever tell any one, that there’s not an act of a man’s life lies dead behind him, but it is blessing or cursing him every step he takes?’

‘By that,’ rejoined Gower, ’I can say Lord Feltre proves there’s wisdom in the truisms of devoutness.’