demonstrably right, Gower’s look at his Madge and the world said.  That ’European rose of the coal-black order,’ as one of his numerous pictures of her painted the girl, was a torch in a cavern for dusky redness at her cheeks.  Her responses beneath the book Mr. Woodseer held open had flashed a distant scene through Lord Fleetwood.  Quaint to notice was her reverence for the husband she set on a towering monument, and her friendly, wifely; whispered jogs at the unpractical creature’s forgetfulness of his wraps, his books; his writing-desk—­on this tremendous occasion, his pipe.  Again the earl could have sworn, that despite her antecedents, she brought her husband honest dower, as surely as she gave the lucky Pagan a whole heart; and had a remarkably fine bust to house the organ, too; and a clarionet of a voice, curiously like her, mistress’s.  And not a bad fellow, but a heathen dog, a worshipper of Nature, walked off with the girl, whose voice had the ring of Carinthia’s.  The Powers do not explain their dispensations.

These two now one by united good-will for the junction Lord Fleetwood himself drove through Loudon to the hills, where another carriage awaited them by his orders, in the town of London’s race-course.  As soon as they were seated he nodded to them curtly from his box, and drove back, leaving them puzzled.  But his countess had not so very coldly seen him start his horses to convey the modest bridal pair.  His impulses to kindness could be politic.  Before quitting Whitechapel, she went with Sarah to look at the old shop of the fruits and vegetables.  They found it shut, untenanted; Mr. Woodseer told them that the earl was owner of it by recent purchase, and would not lease it.  He had to say why; for the countess was dull to the notion of a sentimental desecration in the occupying of her bedchamber by poor tradespeople.  She was little flattered.  The great nobleman of her imagination when she lay there dwindled to a whimsy infant, despot of his nursery, capricious with his toys; likely to damage himself, if left to himself.

How it might occur, she heard hourly from her hostess, Lady Arpington; from Henrietta as well, in different terms.  He seemed to her no longer the stationed nobleman, but one of other idle men, and the saddest of young men.  His weakness cast a net on her.  Worse than that drag of compassion, she foresaw the chance of his having experience of her own weakness, if she was to be one among idle women:  she might drop to the love of him again.  Chillon’s damping of her enthusiasm sank her to a mere breathing body, miserably an animal body, no comrade for a valiant brother; this young man’s feeble consort, perhaps:  and a creature thirsting for pleasure, disposed to sigh in the prospect of caresses.  Enthusiasm gone, her spirited imagination of active work on the field of danger beside her brother flapped a broken wing.