He had to communicate, for the disburdening of his soul, not only that he was guilty, but the meanest of criminals, in being no more than half guilty.  His training told him of the contempt women entertain toward the midway or cripple sinner, when they have no special desire to think him innocent.  How write, or even how phrase his having merely breathed in his ruffian’s hearing the wish that he might hear of her husband’s defeat!  And with what object?  Here, too, a woman might, years hence, if not forgive, bend her head resignedly over the man’s vile nature, supposing strong passion his motive.  But the name for the actual motive?  It would not bear writing, or any phrasing round it.  An unsceptred despot bidden take a fair woman’s eyes into his breast, saw and shrank.  And now the eyes were Carinthia’s:  he saw a savage bridegroom, and a black ladder-climber, and the sweetest of pardoning brides, and the devil in him still insatiate for revenge upon her who held him to his word.

He wrote, read, tore the page, trimmed the lamp, and wrote again.  He remembered Gower Woodseer’s having warned him he would finish his career a monk.  Not, like Feltre, an oily convert, but under the hood, yes, and extracting a chartreuse from his ramble through woods richer far than the philosopher’s milk of Mother Nature’s bosom.  There flamed the burning signal of release from his torments; there his absolving refuge, instead of his writing fruitless, intricate, impossible stuff to a woman.  The letter was renounced and shredded:  the dedicated ascetic contemplated a hooded shape, washed of every earthly fleck.  It proved how men may by power of grip squeeze raptures out of pain.

CHAPTER XLV

CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT HAPPENED

The Dame is at her thumps for attention to be called to ’the strangeness of it,’ that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet, on the most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land, should at this period become ’the cynosure of a city beautifully named by the poet Great Augusta, and truly indeed the world’s metropolis.’

Put aside her artful pother to rouse excitement at stages of a narrative, London’s general eye upon little Croridge was but another instance of the extraordinary and not so wonderful.  Lady Arpington, equal to a Parliament in herself, spoke of the place and the countess courted by her repentant lord.  Brailstone and Chumley Potts were town criers of the executioner letter each had received from the earl; Potts with his chatter of a suicide’s pistol kept loaded in a case under a two-inch-long silver Cross, and with sundry dramatic taps on the forehead, Jottings over the breast, and awful grimace of devoutness.  There was no mistaking him.  The young nobleman of the millions was watched; the town spyglass had him in its orbit.  Tales of the ancestral Fleetwoods