s. But the figure of a 'monastic man of fashion' was
antipathetic to the earl, and he flouted an English Protestant
mass merely because of his being highly individual, and therefore
revolutionary for the minority.

He cast his bitter cud aside. 'My man should have arrived. Lady
Fleetwood at home?'

Gower spoke of her having gone to Croridge in the morning.

'Has she taken the child?'

'She has, yes. For the air of the heights.'

'For greater security. Lady Arpington praises the thoughtful mother. I
rather expected to see the child.'

'They can't be much later,' Gower supposed.

'You don't feel your long separation from "the object"?'

Letting him have his cushion for pins, Gower said 'It needs all my
philosophy:

He was pricked and probed for the next five minutes; not bad rallying,
the earl could be smart when he smarted. Then they descended the terrace
to meet Lady Fleetwood driving her pony-trap. She gave a brief single
nod to the salute of her lord, quite in the town-lady's manner,
surprisingly.

CHAPTER XLI. IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES
FROM THEM

The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last. Fleetwood went,
like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in
the back turned to his wife's along the corridor, that our ordinary
comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct. She was
Arctic, and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put
between them. A removal of either of them from life--or from 'the act of
breathing,' as Gower Woodseer's contempt of the talk about death would
call it--was an imaginable way of making it a wider division. Ambrose
Mallard was far enough from his fatal lady now--farther than the Poles
asunder. Ambrose, if the clergy will allow him, has found his peace..
But the road and the means he chose were a madman's.

The blotting of our character, to close our troubles, is the final proof
of our being 'sons of vapour,' according to Gower Woodseer's heartless
term for poor Ambrose and the lot. They have their souls; and above
philosophy, 'natural' or unnatural, they may find a shelter. They can
show in their desperation that they are made of blood, as philosophers
rather fail of doing. An insignificant brainless creature like Feltre
had wits, by the aid of his religion, to help or be charitable to his
fellows, particularly the sinners, in the crisis of life, surpassing any
philosopher's.

Informa