present courage certain of its reward without as well as within; for then we show our fellows that the slough is cast.  But life is a continuous fight; and members of the social world display its degree of civilization by fighting in armour; most of them are born in it; and their armour is more sensitive than their skins.  It was Fleetwood’s instinct of his inability to fling it off utterly which warned him of his loss of the wife, whose enthusiasm to wait on her brother in danger might have subsided into the channel of duty, even tenderness, had he been able resolutely to strip himself bare.  This was the further impossible to him, because of a belief he now imposed upon himself, to cover the cowardly shrinking from so extreme a penitential act, that such confessions are due from men to the priest only, and that he could confess wholly and absolutely to the priest—­to heaven, therefore, under seal, and in safety, but with perfect repentance.

So, compelled to keep his inner self unknown, he fronted Chillon; courteously, in the somewhat lofty seeming of a guarded manner, he requested audience for a few minutes; observing the princely figure of the once hated man, and understanding Henrietta’s sheer womanly choice of him; Carinthia’s idolatry, too, as soon as he had spoken.  The man was in his voice.

Chillon said:  ’It concerns my sister, I have to think.  In that case, her wish is to be present.  Your lordship will shorten the number of minutes for the interview by permitting it.’

Fleetwood encountered Carinthia’s eyes.  They did not entreat or defy.  They seconded her brother, and were a civil shining naught on her husband.  He bowed his head, constrained, feeling heavily the two to one.

She replied to the look:  ’My brother and I have a single mind.  We save time by speaking three together, my lord.’

He was led into the long room of the workshop, where various patterns of muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords were stars, crosses, wedges, over the walls, and a varnished wooden model of a piece of cannon occupied the middle place, on a block.

Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war were common on those days among a people beginning to sit with habitual snugness at the festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers.  Fleetwood had not been on the side of the banqueting citizens, though his country’s journals and her feasted popular wits made a powerful current to whelm opposition.  But the appearance of the woman, his wife, here, her head surrounded by destructive engines in the form of trophy, and the knowledge that this woman bearing his name designed to be out at the heels of a foreign army or tag-rag of uniformed rascals, inspired him to reprobate men’s bad old game as heartily as good sense does in the abstract, and as derisively as it is the way with comfortable islanders before the midnight trumpet-notes of panic have tumbled them to their legs.  He took his chair; sickened.