link uniting them; and she looked at him.  He blinked rapidly, as she had seen him do of late, but kept his eyes on her through the nervous flutter of the lids; his pride making a determined stand for physical mastery, though her look was but a look.  Had there been reproach in it, he would have found the voice to speak out.  Her look was a cold sky above a hungering man.  She froze his heart from the marble of her own.

And because she was for adventuring with her brother at bloody work of civil war in the pay of a foreign government!—­he found a short refuge in that mute sneer, and was hurled from it by an apparition of the Welsh scene of the bitten infant, and Carinthia volunteering to do the bloody work which would have saved it; which he had contested, ridiculed.  Right then, her insanity now conjured the wretched figure of him opposing the martyr her splendid humaneness had offered her to be, and dominated his reason, subjected him to admire—­on to worship of the woman, whatever she might do.  Just such a feeling for a woman he had dreamed of in his younger time, doubting that he would ever meet the fleshly woman to impose it.  His heart broke the frost she breathed.  Yet, if he gave way to the run of speech, he knew himself unmanned, and the fatal habit of superiority stopped his tongue after he had uttered the name he loved to speak, as nearest to the embrace of her.

’Carinthia—­so I think, as I said, we both see the common sense of the position.  I regret over and over again—­we’ll discuss all that when we meet after this Calesford affair.  I shall have things to say.  You will overlook, I am sure—­well, men are men!—­or try to.  Perhaps I’m not worse than—­we’ll say, some.  You will, I know,—­I have learnt it,—­be of great service, help to me; double my value, I believe; more than double it.  You will receive me—­here?  Or at Croridge or Esslemont; and alone together, as now, I beg.’

That was what he said.  Having said it, his escape from high tragics in the comfortable worldly tone rejoiced him; to some extent also the courteous audience she gave him.  And her hand was not refused.  Judging by her aspect, the plain common-sense ground of their situation was accepted for the best opening step to their union; though she must have had her feelings beneath it, and God knew that he had!  Her hand was friendly.  He could have thanked her for yielding her hand without a stage scene; she had fine breeding by nature.  The gracefullest of trained ladies could not have passed through such an interview so perfectly in the right key; and this was the woman he had seen at the wrestle with hideous death to save a muddy street-child!  She touched the gentleman in him.  Hard as it was while he held the hand of the wife, his little son’s mother, who might be called his bride, and drew him by the contact of their blood to a memory, seeming impossible, some other world’s attested reality,—­she the angel, he the demon of it,—­unimaginable,