it; I could swear it before a judge, from what I know.  Those Rundles at that inn don’t hear anything it suits him to do.  All the people down in those parts are slaves to him.  And I thought he was a real St. George before,—­yes, ready I was to kiss the ground his feet crossed.  If you could, it’s Chinningfold near where Admiral Fakenham lives, down Hampshire way.  Her friends ought to hear what’s happened to her.  They’ll find her in a queer place.  She might go to the minister’s.  I believe she’s happier with us girls.’

Gower pledged his word to start for Chinningfold early as the light next day.  He liked the girl the better, in an amicable fashion, now that his nerves had got free of the transient spell of her kettle tone—­the hardly varied one note of a heart boiling with sisterly devotion to a misused stranger of her sex;—­and, after the way of his race, imagination sprang up in him, at the heels of the quieted senses, releasing him from the personal and physical to grasp the general situation and place the protagonist foremost.

He thought of Carinthia, with full vision of her.  Some wrong had been done, or some violation of the right, to guess from the girl Madge’s molten words in avoidance of the very words.  It implied—­though it might be but one of Love’s shrewder discords—­such suspected traitorous dealing of a man with their sister woman as makes the world of women all woman toward her.  They can be that, and their being so illuminates their hidden sentiments in relation to the mastering male, whom they uphold.

But our uninformed philosopher was merely picking up scraps of sheddings outside the dark wood of the mystery they were to him, and playing imagination upon them.  This primary element of his nature soon enthroned his chosen lady above their tangled obscurities.  Beneath her tranquil beams, with the rapture of the knowledge that her name on earth was Livia, he threaded East London’s thoroughfares,—­on a morning when day and night were made one by fog, to journey down to Chinningfold, by coach, in the service of the younger Countess of Fleetwood, whose right to the title he did not doubt, though it directed surprise movements at his understanding from time to time.

CHAPTER XX

Studies in fog, gout, an old seaman, A lovely serpent, and the moral effects that may come of A borrowed shirt

Money of his father’s enabled Gower to take the coach; and studies in fog, from the specked brown to the woolly white, and the dripping torn, were proposed to the traveller, whose preference of Nature’s face did not arrest his observation of her domino and petticoats; across which blank sheets he curiously read backward, that he journeyed by the aid of his father’s hard-earned, ungrudged piece of gold.