He had the Cymric and Celtic respect of character; which puts aside the person’s environments to face the soul.  He was also an impressionable fellow among his fellows, a philosopher only at his leisure, in his courted solitudes.  Getting away some strides from this girl of the drilling voice,—­the shudder-voice, he phrased it,—­the lady for whom she pleaded came clearer into his view and gradually absorbed him; though it was an emulation with the girl Madge, of which he was a trifle conscious, that drove him to do his work of service in the directest manner.  He then fancied the girl had caught something of the tone of her lady:  the savage intensity or sincerity; and he brooded on Carinthia’s position, the mixture of the astounding and the woful in her misadventure.  One could almost laugh at our human fate, to think of a drop off the radiant mountain heights upon a Whitechapel greengrocer’s shop, gathering the title of countess midway.

But nothing of the ludicrous touched her; no, and if we bring reason to scan our laugh at pure humanity, it is we who are in the place of the ridiculous, for doing what reason disavows.  Had he not named her, Carinthia, Saint and Martyr, from a first perusal of her face?  And Lord Fleetwood had read and repeated it.  Lord Fleetwood had become the instrument to martyrize her?  That might be; there was a hoard of bad stuff in his composition besides the precious:  and this was a nobleman owning enormous wealth, who could vitiate himself by disposing of a multitude of men and women to serve his will, a shifty will.  Wealth creates the magician, and may breed the fiend within him.  In the hands of a young man, wealth is an invitation to devilry.  Gower’s idea of the story of Carinthia inclined to charge Lord Fleetwood with every possible false dealing.  He then quashed the charge, and decided to wait for information.

At the second of the aristocratic Clubs of London’s West, into which he stepped like an easy member, the hall-porter did not examine his clothing from German hat to boots, and gave him Lord Fleetwood’s town address.  He could tell Madge at night by the door of the shuttered shop, that Lord Fleetwood had gone down to Wales.

‘It means her having to wait,’ she said.  ’The minister has been to the coach-office, to order up her box from that inn.  He did it in his name; they can’t refuse; no money’s owing.  She must have a change.  Sally has fifteen pounds locked up in case of need.’

Sally’s capacity and economy fetched the penniless philosopher a slap.

‘You’ve taken to this lady,’ he said.

’She held my hand, while Kit Ines was at his work; and I was new to her, and a prize-fighter’s lass, they call me:—­upon the top of that nobleman’s coach, where he made me sit, behind her, to see the fight; and she his wedded lady that morning.  A queer groom.  He may keep Kit Ines from drink, he’s one of you men, and rides over anything in his way.  I can’t speak