He handed her the rod to chastise him.  Her exchange of Christian names with the Welshman would not do it; she was too transparently sisterly, provincially simple; she was, in fact, respected.  Any whipping from her was child’s play to him, on whom, if he was to be made to suffer, the vision of the intense felicity of austerest asceticism brought the sensation as bracingly as the Boreal morning animates men of high blood in ice regions.  She could but gently sting, even if vindictive.

Along the heights, outside the village, some way below a turn of the road to Lekkatts, a gentleman waved hand.  The earl saluted with his whip, and waited for him.

‘Nothing wrong, Mr. Wythan?’

‘Nothing to fear, my lord.’

‘I get a trifle uneasy.’

‘The countess will not leave her brother.’

A glow of his countess’s friendliness for this open-faced, prompt-speaking, good fellow of the faintly inky eyelids, and possibly sheepish inclinations, melted Fleetwood.  Our downright repentance of misconduct toward a woman binds us at least to the tolerant recognition of what poor scraps of consolement she may have picked up between then and now—­when we can stretch fist in flame to defy it on the oath of her being a woman of honour.

The earl alighted and said:  ’Her brother, I suspect, is the key of the position.’

‘He’s worth it—­she loves her brother,’ said Mr. Wythan, betraying a feature of his quick race, with whom the reflection upon a statement is its lightning in advance.

Gratified by the instant apprehension of his meaning, Fleetwood interpreted the Welshman’s.  ’I have to see the brother worthy of her love.  Can you tell me the hour likely to be convenient?’. . . . .

Mr. Wythan thought an appointment unnecessary which conveyed the sufficient assurance of audience granted.

‘You know her brother well, Mr. Wythan?’

’Know him as if I had known him for years.  They both come to the mind as faith comes—­no saying how; one swears by them.’

Fleetwood eyed the Welsh gentleman, with an idea that he might readily do the same by him.

Mr. Wythan’s quarters were at the small village inn, whither he was on his way to breakfast.  The earl slipped an arm through the bridle reins and walked beside him, listening to an account of the situation at Lekkatts.  It was that extraordinary complication of moves and checks which presents in the main a knot, for the powers above to cut.  A miserly old lord withholds arrears of wages; his workmen strike at a critical moment; his nephew, moved by common humanity, draws upon crippled resources to supply their extremer needs, though they are ruining his interests.  They made one night a demonstration of the terrorizing sort round Lekkatts, to give him a chorus; and the old lord fired at them out of window and wounded a man.  For that they vowed vengeance.  All the new gunpowder milled in Surrey was, for some purpose