Behind his white plaster of composure, Lord Fleetwood had alternately raged and wondered during the passage of the Welsh cavalcade up Eastward:  a gigantic burlesque, that would have swept any husband of their heroine off the scene had he failed to encounter it deferentially, preserving his countenance and ostensibly his temper.  An idiot of a woman, incurable in her lunacy, suspects the father of the infant as guilty of designs done to death in romances; and so she manages to set going solemnly a bigger blazing Tom Fool’s show than any known or written romance gives word of!  And that fellow, Gower Woodseer, pleads, in apology, for her husband’s confusion, physiologically, that it comes of her having been carried off and kept a prisoner when she was bearing the child and knitting her whole mind to ensure the child.  But what sheer animals these women are, if they take impressions in such a manner!  And Mr. Philosopher argues that the abusing of women proves the hating of Nature; names it ’the commonest insanity, and the deadliest,’ and men are ’planted in the bog of their unclean animal condition until they do proper homage to the animal Nature makes the woman be.’  Oh, pish, sir!—­as Meeson Corby had the habit of exclaiming when Abrane’s ‘fiddler’ argues him into a corner.  The fellow can fiddle fine things and occasionally clear sense:—­’Men hating Nature are insane.  Women and Nature are close.  If it is rather general to hate Nature and maltreat women, we begin to see why the world is a mad world.’  That is the tune of the fiddler’s fiddling.  As for him, something protects him.  He was the slave of Countess Livia; like Abrane, Mallard, Corby, St. Ombre, young Cressett, and the dozens.  He is now her master.  Can a man like that be foolish, in saying of the Countess Carinthia, she is ‘not only quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding’?  Gower Woodseer said it of her in Wales, and again on the day of his walk up to London from Esslemont, after pedestrian exercise, which may heat the frame, but cools the mind.  She stamped that idea on a thoughtful fellow.

He’s a Welshman.  They are all excitable,—­have heads on hound’s legs for a flying figure in front.  Still, they must have an object, definitely seen by them—­definite to them if dim to their neighbours; and it will run in the poetic direction:  and the woman to win them, win all classes of them, within so short a term, is a toss above extraordinary.  She is named Carinthia—­suitable name for the Welsh pantomimic procession.  Or cry out the word in an amphitheatre of Alpine crags,—­it sounds at home.

She is a daughter of the mountains,—­should never have left them.  She is also a daughter of the Old Buccaneer—­no poor specimen of the fighting Englishman of his day.  According to Rose Mackrell, he, this Old Buccaneer, it was, who, by strange adventures, brought the great Welsh mines into the family!  He would not be ashamed in spying through his nautical glass, up or down,