no longer a novice in the social manner.  An equal whom he had injured waited for his remarks, gave ready replies; and he, bowing to the visible equality, chafed at a sense of inferiority following his acknowledgement of it.  He was alone with her, and next to dumb; she froze a full heart.  As for his heart, it could not speak at all, it was a swinging lump.  The rational view of the situation was exposed to her; and she listened to that favourably, or at least attentively; but with an edge to her civil smile when he hinted of entertainments, voyages, travels, an excursion to her native mountain land.  Her brother would then be facing death.  The rational view, she admitted, was one to be considered.  Yes, they were married; they had a son; they were bound to sink misunderstandings, in the interests of their little son.  He ventured to say that the child was a link uniting them; and she looked at him.  He blinked rapidly, as she had seen him do of late, but kept his eyes on her through the nervous flutter of the lids; his pride making a determined stand for physical mastery, though her look was but a look.  Had there been reproach in it, he would have found the voice to speak out.  Her look was a cold sky above a hungering man.  She froze his heart from the marble of her own.

And because she was for adventuring with her brother at bloody work of civil war in the pay of a foreign government!—­he found a short refuge in that mute sneer, and was hurled from it by an apparition of the Welsh scene of the bitten infant, and Carinthia volunteering to do the bloody work which would have saved it; which he had contested, ridiculed.  Right then, her insanity now conjured the wretched figure of him opposing the martyr her splendid humaneness had offered her to be, and dominated his reason, subjected him to admire—­on to worship of the woman, whatever she might do.  Just such a feeling for a woman he had dreamed of in his younger time, doubting that he would ever meet the fleshly woman to impose it.  His heart broke the frost she breathed.  Yet, if he gave way to the run of speech, he knew himself unmanned, and the fatal habit of superiority stopped his tongue after he had uttered the name he loved to speak, as nearest to the embrace of her.

’Carinthia—­so I think, as I said, we both see the common sense of the position.  I regret over and over again—­we’ll discuss all that when we meet after this Calesford affair.  I shall have things to say.  You will overlook, I am sure—­well, men are men!—­or try to.  Perhaps I’m not worse than—­we’ll say, some.  You will, I know,—­I have learnt it,—­be of great service, help to me; double my value, I believe; more than double it.  You will receive me—­here?  Or at Croridge or Esslemont; and alone together, as now, I beg.’