‘You have a letter from her?’

Henrietta sighed that it would not bear exposure to him:  ‘Yes.’

‘Nicely worded?’

‘Well, yes, it is.’

He paused, not expecting that the letter would be shown, but silence fired shots, and he had stopped the petition.  ’We are to have you for a week’s yachting.  You prescribe your company.  Only be merciful.  Exclusion will mean death to some.  Columelli will be touring in Switzerland.  You shall have him in the house when my new bit of ground Northwest of London is open:  very handy, ten miles out.  We’ll have the Opera troupe there, and you shall command the Opera.’

Her beauty sweetened to thank him.

If, as Livia said, his passion for her was unchanged, the generosity manifested in the considerate screen it wore over any physical betrayal of it, deserved the lustre of her eyes.  It dwelt a moment, vivid with the heart close behind and remorseful for misreading of old his fine character.  Here was a young man who could be the very kindest of friends to the woman rejecting him to wed another.  Her smile wavered.  How shall a loving wife express warmth of sentiment elsewhere, without the one beam too much, that plunges her on a tideway?  His claim of nothing called for everything short of the proscribed.  She gave him her beauty in fullest flower.

It had the appearance of a temptation; and he was not tempted, though he admired; his thought being, Husband of the thing!

But he admired.  That condition awakened his unsatisfied past days to desire positive proof of her worthlessness.  The past days writhed in him.  The present were loveless, entirely cold.  He had not even the wish to press her hand.  The market held beautiful women of a like description.  He wished simply to see her proved the thing he read her to be:  and not proved as such by himself.  He was unable to summon or imagine emotion enough for him to simulate the forms by which fair women are wooed to their perdition.  For all he cared, any man on earth might try, succeed or fail, as long as he had visual assurance that she coveted, a slave to the pleasures commanded by the wealth once disdained by her.  Till that time, he could not feel himself perfectly free.

Dame Gossip prefers to ejaculate.  Young men are mysteries! and bowl us onward.  No one ever did comprehend the Earl of Fleetwood, she says:  he was bad, he was good; he was whimsical and stedfast; a splendid figure, a mark for ridicule; romantic and a close arithmetician; often a devil, sometimes the humanest of creatures.