’My Diary of to-day is all bestowed on you.  What have I to write in it except the pair of commas under the last line of yesterday—­“He has not come!” Oh! to be caring for a he.

’O that I were with your sister now, on one side of her idol, to correct her extravagant idolatry!  I long for her.  I had a number of nice little phrases to pet her with.

’You have said (I have it written) that men who are liked by men are the best friends for women.  In which case, the earl should be worthy of our friendship; he is liked.  Captain Abrane and Sir Meeson, in spite of the hard service he imposes on them with such comical haughtiness, incline to speak well of him, and Methuen Rivers—­here for two days on his way to his embassy at Vienna—­assured us he is the rarest of gentlemen on the point of honour of his word.  They have stories of him, to confirm Livia’s eulogies, showing him punctilious to chivalry:  No man alive is like him in that, they say.  He grieves me.  All that you have to fear is my pity for one so sensitive.  So speed, sir!  It is not good for us to be much alone, and I am alone when you are absent.

’I hear military music!

’How grand that music makes the dullest world appear in a minute.  There is a magic in it to bring you to me from the most dreadful of distances.—­Chillon! it would kill me!—­Writing here and you perhaps behind the hill, I can hardly bear it;—­I am torn away, my hand will not any more.  This music burst out to mock me!  Adieu.

          ’I am yours.

’Your Henrietta.

‘A kiss to the sister.  It is owing to her.’

Carinthia kissed the letter on that last line.  It seemed to her to end in a celestial shower.

She was oppressed by wonder of the writer who could run like the rill of the mountains in written speech; and her recollection of the contents perpetually hurried to the close, which was more in her way of writing, for there the brief sentences had a throb beneath them.

She did not speak of the letter to her brother when she returned it.  A night in the carriage, against his shoulder, was her happy prospect, in the thought that she would be with her dearest all night, touching him asleep, and in the sweet sense of being near to the beloved of the fairest angel of her sex.  They pursued their journey soon after Anton was dismissed with warm shakes of the hand and appointments for a possible year in the future.

The blast of the postillion’s horn on the dark highway moved Chillon to say:  ‘This is what they call posting, my dear.’

She replied:  ’Tell me, brother:  I do not understand, “Let none these marks efface,” at the commencement, after most “picturesque of Castles":—­that is you.’

’They are quoted from the verses of a lord who was a poet, addressed to the castle on Lake Leman.  She will read them to you.’

‘Will she?’

The mention of the lord set Carinthia thinking of the lord whom that beautiful she pitied because she was forced to wound him and he was very sensitive.  Wrapped in Henrietta, she slept through the joltings of the carriage, the grinding of the wheels, the blowing of the horn, the flashes of the late moonlight and the kindling of dawn.