by me.  She has had her experience.  She chooses rightly.  Paint the risks she runs, you lay the colours on those she escapes.’  She thanks the treatment she has undergone for her freedom to choose.  I am responsible for nothing but the not having stood against her most wretched marriage.  It might have been foreseen.  Out there in the war she is protected.  Here she is with—­I spare your lordship the name.’

Fleetwood would have heard harsher had he not been Carinthia’s husband.  He withheld his reply.  The language moved him to proud hostility:  but the speaker was Carinthia’s brother.

He said to her:  ‘You won’t forget Gower and Madge?’

She gave him a smile in saying:  ’It shall be settled for a day after next week.’

The forms of courtesy were exchanged.

At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said:  ’He did send a message:  I gathered it—­without the words—­from our Uncle Griphard.  I thought him in honour bound to you—­and it suited me that I should.’

‘I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,’ said Carinthia.  ’That was my treachery to the love of my brother. .  I dream of father and mother reproaching me.’

The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind’s picture of the early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again, as no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with him from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and Spanish Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment for having abandoned a sister’s duties in the quest of personal happiness.

But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind’s intelligence, wherein was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her to gather more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man stripped of his terrors.  She penetrated the discrowned tyrant’s nature some distance, deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms.  These, combined with his assured high style, had woven him the magical coat, threadbare to quiet scrutiny.  She matched him beside her brother.  The dwarfed object was then observed; and it was not for a woman to measure herself beside him.  She came, however, of a powerful blood, and he was pressing her back on her resources:  without the measurement or a thought of it, she did that which is the most ordinary and the least noticed of our daily acts in civilized intercourse, she subjected him to the trial of the elements composing him, by collision with what she felt of her own; and it was because she felt them strongly, aware of her feeling them, but unaware of any conflict, that the wrestle occurred.  She flung him, pitied him, and passed on along her path elsewhere.  This can be done when love is gone.  It is done more or less at any meeting of men and men; and men and women who love not are perpetually doing it, unconsciously or sensibly.  Even in their love, a time for the trial arrives among certain of them; and the leadership is assumed, and submission ensues, tacitly; nothing of the contention being spoken, perhaps, nothing definitely known.