’Let me say in my turn; I may help you, dear.  You know I have my husband’s love, as he mine.  Am I, have I ever been a wife to him?  Here I lie, a dead weight, to be carried up and down, all of a wife that Owain has had for years.  I lie and pray to be taken, that my good man, my proved good man, may be free to choose a healthy young woman and be rewarded before his end by learning what a true marriage is.  The big simpleton will otherwise be going to his grave, thinking he was married!  I see him stepping about softly in my room, so contented if he does not disturb me, and he crushes me with a desire to laugh at him while I worship.  I tricked him into marrying the prostrate invalid I am, and he can’t discover the trick, he will think it’s a wife he has, instead of a doctor’s doll.  Oh! you have a strange husband, it has been a strange marriage for you, but you have your invincible health, you have not to lie and feel the horror of being a deception to a guileless man, whose love blindfolds him.  The bitter ache to me is, that I can give nothing.  You abound in power to give.’

Carinthia lifted her open hands for sign of their emptiness.

’My brother would not want, if I could give.  He may have to sell out of. the army, he thinks, fears; and I must look on.  Our mother used to say she had done something for her country in giving a son like Chillon to the British army.  Poor mother!  Our bright opening days all seem to end in rain.  We should turn to Mr. Wythan for a guide.’

‘He calls you Morgan le Fay christianized.’

‘What I am!’ Carinthia raised and let fall her head.  ’An example makes dwarfs of us.  When Mr. Wythan does penance for temper by descending into his mine and working among his men for a day with the pick, seated, as he showed me down below, that is an example.  If I did like that, I should have no firedamp in the breast, and not such a task to forgive, that when I succeed I kill my feelings.’

The entry of Madge and Martha, the nurse-girl, with the overflowing armful of baby, changed their converse into melodious exclamations.

‘Kit Ines has arrived, my lady,’ Madge said.  ’I saw him on the road and stopped a minute.’

Mrs. Wythan studied Carinthia.  Her sharp invalid’s ears had caught the name.  She beckoned.  ‘The man who—­the fighting man?’

‘It will be my child this time,’ said Carinthia; ’I have no fear for myself.’  She was trembling, though her features were hard for the war her lord had declared, as it seemed.  ’Did he tell you his business here?’ she asked of Madge.

‘He says, to protect you, my lady, since you won’t leave.’

‘He stays at the castle?’

‘He is to stay there, he says, as long as the Welsh are out.’

‘The “Welsh” are misunderstood by Lord Fleetwood,’

Mrs. Wythan said to Carinthia.  ’He should live among them.  They will not hurt their lady.  Protecting may be his intention; but we will have our baby safe here.  Not?’ she appealed.  ’And baby’s mother.  How otherwise?’