fy an ardour conveyed by the
fire of the breath. Her quick devotion to a lady exciting enthusiasm
through admiring pity for the grace of a much-tried quiet sweetness,
was explained; apart from other reasons, feminine or hidden, which might
exist. Only a Welsh girl would be so quick and all in it, with a voice
intimating a heated cauldron under her mouth. None but a Welsh-blooded
girl, risking her good name to follow and nurse the man she considered
a hero, would carry her head to look virgin eyes as she did. One could
swear to them, Gower thought. Contact with her spirited him out of his
mooniness.

He had the Cymric and Celtic respect of character; which puts aside the
person's environments to face the soul. He was also an impressionable
fellow among his fellows, a philosopher only at his leisure, in his
courted solitudes. Getting away some strides from this girl of the
drilling voice,--the shudder-voice, he phrased it,--the lady for whom
she pleaded came clearer into his view and gradually absorbed him;
though it was an emulation with the girl Madge, of which he was a trifle
conscious, that drove him to do his work of service in the directest
manner. He then fancied the girl had caught something of the tone of her
lady: the savage intensity or sincerity; and he brooded on Carinthia's
position, the mixture of the astounding and the woful in her
misadventure. One could almost laugh at our human fate, to think of a
drop off the radiant mountain heights upon a Whitechapel greengrocer's
shop, gathering the title of countess midway.

But nothing of the ludicrous touched her; no, and if we bring reason to
scan our laugh at pure humanity, it is we who are in the place of
the ridiculous, for doing what reason disavows. Had he not named her,
Carinthia, Saint and Martyr, from a first perusal of her face? And
Lord Fleetwood had read and repeated it. Lord Fleetwood had become the
instrument to martyrize her? That might be; there was a hoard of bad
stuff in his composition besides the precious: and this was a nobleman
owning enormous wealth, who could vitiate himself by disposing of a
multitude of men and women to serve his will, a shifty will. Wealth
creates the magician, and may breed the fiend within him. In the hands
of a young man, wealth is an invitation to devilry. Gower's idea of the
story of Carinthia inclined to charge Lord Fleetwood with every possible
false dealing. He then quashed the charge, and decided to wait for