He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal.  Knowing it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to propitiate—­and his lips pecked the baby’s cheek.  Its mother held arms for it immediately.

Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with little of a mind to see.

The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness.  Gower had singular experiences of him on the drive North-westward.  He scarcely spoke; he said once:  ’If you mean to marry, you’ll be wanting to marry soon, of course,’ and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to signify, the sooner the better, and deliverance for both of us.  Honest though he might, be sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque, the philosopher’s day had come to an end.  How can Philosophy minister to raw wounds, when we are in a rageing gale of the vexations, battered to right and left!  Religion has a nourishing breast:  Philosophy is breastless.  Religion condones offences:  Philosophy has no forgiveness, is an untenanted confessional:  ’wide air to a cry in anguish,’ Feltre says.

All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk when he would.

He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs and spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man, yearning for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances, the ointment brought comfort.

It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard’s grave; where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley Potts should be so inconsolably shaken.  Well, and if the priests have the secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity, why not go to the priests, Chummy?  Potts’s hearing was not addressed; nor was the chief person in the meditation affected by a question that merely jumped out of his perturbed interior.

Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate grew immeasurable.  It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere or other—­when felon spectres were abroad over earth—­been conceived.

He could then return to Esslemont.  Gower was told kindly, with intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he liked; and he liked, and took it.  Anything to get to that girl of his!