nted only in the breasts of
very favourite maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love
was the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though,
true, she had not Henrietta's golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta,
illumined with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the
tale of love. Would she? For credulous men she would be golden coin of
the currency. She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as
of the running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the
hunter's heart with pity.

Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having
fought and laid his wilder self. He might be likened to the doctor's
patient entering the chemist's shop, with a prescription for a drug
of healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a
robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who
have rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and
hearken the intonation of good words.

CHAPTER XXII. A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY

The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as
the pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens
courtliness to hard attention.

After the names of Admiral Baldwin and 'the Mr. Woodseer,' the name of
Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington. It might have been the name
of any other place.

'Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you,' she said, observing the
young earl. 'I drove down there yesterday. I saw the lady calling
herself Countess of Fleetwood. By right? She was a Miss Kirby.'

'She has the right,' Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge
of musketry.

'Marriage not contested. You knew of her being in that place?--I can't
describe it.'

'Your ladyship will pardon me?'

London's frontier of barbarism was named for him again, and in a tone to
penetrate.

He refrained from putting the question of how she had come there.

As iron as he looked, he said: 'She stays there by choice.'

The great lady tapped her foot on the floor.

'You are not acquainted with the district.'

'One of my men comes out of it.'

'The coming out of it!... However, I understand her story, that she
travelled from a village inn, where she had been left-without resources.
She waited weeks; I forget how many. She has a description of maid in
attendance on her. She came to London to find her husband. You were
at the mines, we heard. Her one desire is