She was about to cross the hill and breakfast with Mrs. Wythan.  The time for the weaning of the babe approached, and had as prospect beyond it her dull fear that her husband would say the mother’s work was done, and seize the pretext to separate them:  and she could not claim a longer term to be giving milk, because her father had said:  ’Not a quarter of a month more than nine for the milk of the mother’—­or else the child would draw an unsustaining nourishment from the strongest breast.  She could have argued her exceptional robustness against another than he.  But the dead father wanting to build a great race of men and women ruled.

Carinthia knelt at the cradle of a princeling gone from the rich repast to his alternative kingdom.

‘You will bring him over when he wakes,’ she said to Madge.  ’Mrs. Wythan would like to see him every day.  Martha can walk now.’

‘She can walk and hold a child in her two arms, my lady,’ said Madge.  ’She expects miners popping up out of the bare ground when she sees no goblins.’

‘They!—­they know him, they would not hurt him, they know my son,’ her mistress answered.

The population of the mines in revolt had no alarms for her.  The works were empty down below.  Men sat by the wayside brooding or strolled in groups, now and then loudly exercising their tongues; or they stood in circle to sing hymns:  melancholy chants of a melancholy time for all.

How would her father have acted by these men?  He would have been among them.  Dissensions in his mine were vapours of a day.  Lords behaved differently.  Carinthia fancied the people must regard their master as a foreign wizard, whose power they felt, without the chance of making their cry to him heard.  She, too, dealt with a lord.  It was now his wish for her to leave the place where she had found some shreds of a home in the thought of being useful.  She was gathering the people’s language; many of their songs she could sing, and please them by singing to them.  They were not suspicious of her; at least, their women had open doors for her; the men, if shy, were civil.  She had only to go below, she was greeted in the quick tones of their speech all along the street of the slate-roofs.

But none loved the castle, and she as little, saving the one room in it where her boy lay.  The grey of Welsh history knew a real castle beside the roaring brook frequently a torrent.  This was an eighteenth century castellated habitation on the verge of a small wood midway up the height, and it required a survey of numberless happy recollections to illumine its walls or drape its chambers.  The permanently lighted hearth of a dear home, as in that forsaken unfavoured old white house of the wooded Austrian crags, it had not.  Rather it seemed a place waiting for an ill deed to be done in it and stop all lighting of hearths thereafter.

Out on the turf of the shaven hills, her springy step dispersed any misty fancies.  Her short-winged hive set to work in her head as usual, building scaffoldings of great things to be done by Chillon, present evils escaped.  The rolling big bade hills with the riding clouds excited her as she mounted, and she was a figure of gladness on the ridge bending over to hospitable Plas Llwyn, where the Wythans lived, entertaining rich and poor alike.