nd still the earl's virulent small
sneer rankled. He understood why, after a time. The fervour of advocacy,
which inspires high diction, had been wanting. He had sought more
to lash the earl with his personal disgust and partly to parade his
contempt of a lucrative dependency--than he had felt for the countess.
No wonder his diction was poor. It was a sample of limp thinness; a sort
of tongue of a Master Slender:--flavourless, unsatisfactory, considering
its object: measured to be condemned by its poor achievement. He had
nevertheless a heart to feel for the dear lady, and heat the pleading
for her, especially when it ran to its object, as along a shaft of the
sun-rays, from the passionate devotedness of that girl Madge.

He brooded over it till it was like a fire beneath him to drive him from
his bed and across the turfy roller of the hill to the Wythans', in
the front of an autumnal sunrise--grand where the country is shorn
of surface decoration, as here and there we find some unadorned human
creature, whose bosom bears the ball of warmth.

CHAPTER XXXII. IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD
FATHER'S LESSONS

Seated at his breakfast-table, the earl saw Gower stride in, and could
have wagered he knew the destination of the fellow's morning walk. It
concerned him little; he would be leaving the castle in less than an
hour. She might choose to come or choose to keep away. The whims of
animals do not affect men unless they are professionally tamers.
Petty domestic dissensions are besides poor webs to the man pulling
singlehanded at ropes with his revolted miners. On the topic of wages,
too, he was Gower's master, and could hold forth: by which he taught
himself to feel that practical affairs are the proper business of men,
women and infants being remotely secondary; the picturesque and poetry,
consequently, sheer nonsense.

'I suppose your waiting here is useless, to quote you,' he said. 'The
countess can decide now to remain, if she pleases. Drive with me to
Cardiff--I miss you if you 're absent a week. Or is it legs? Drop me a
line of your stages on the road, and don't loiter much.'

Gower spoke of starting his legs next day, if he had to do the journey
alone: and he clouded the yacht for Fleetwood with talk of the Wye and
the Usk, Hereford and the Malvern Hills elliptical over the plains.

'Yes,' the earl acquiesced jealously; 'we ought to have seen--tramped
every foot of our own country