oung women in her position used to
do. So did they sometimes wait for years; they have waited until they
withered into their graves, like the vapours of a brief winter's day: a
moving picture of a sex restrained by modesty in those purer times from
the taking of one step forward unless inquired for.

Two months she waited in our 'dark land.' January arrived, and her
brother. Henrietta communicated the news:

'My Janey, you are asked by Lord Fleetwood whether it is your wish that
he should marry you.'

Now, usually a well-born young woman's answer, if a willing one, is
an example of weak translation. Here it was the heart's native tongue,
without any roundabout, simple but direct.

'Oh, I will, I am ready, tell him.'

Remember, she was not speaking publicly.

Henrietta knew the man enough to be glad he did not hear. She herself
would have felt a little shock on his behalf: only, that answer suited
the scheme of the pair of lovers.

How far those two were innocent in not delivering the whole of Lord
Fleetwood's message to Carinthia Jane through Lord Levellier, we are
unable to learn. We may suspect the miserly nobleman of curtailing it
for his purposes; and such is my idea. But the answer would have been
the same, I am sure.

In consequence and straight away, Chillon John betakes him to Admiral
Baldwin and informs him of Lord Fleetwood's proposal on the night
at Baden, and renewal of it through the mouth of Lord Levellier, not
communicating, however (he may really not have known), the story of how
it had been wrung from the earl by a surprise movement on the part of
the one-armed old lord, who burst out on him in the street from the
ambush of a Club-window, where he had been stationed every day for a
fortnight, indefatigably to watch for the passing of the earl, as there
seemed no other way to find him. They say, indeed, there was a scene,
judging by the result, and it would have been an excellent scene for
the stage; though the two noblemen were to all appearance politely
exchanging their remarks. But the audience hearing what passes,
appreciates the courteous restraint of an attitude so contrasting with
their tempers. Behind the ostentation of civility, their words were
daggers.

For it chanced, that the young earl, after a period of refuge at his
Welsh castle, supposing, as he well might, that his latest mad freak of
the proposal of his hand and title to the strange girl in a quadrille at
a foreign castle h