rld of
London declared it.

The meeting came to pass three days before the great day at Calesford.
Carinthia and her lord were alone together. This had been his burning
wish at Croridge, where he could have poured his heart to her and might
have moved the wife's. But she had formed her estimate of him there: she
had, in the comparison or clash of forces with him, grown to contemplate
the young man of wealth and rank, who had once been impatient of
an allusion to her father, and sought now to part her from her
brother--stop her breathing of fresh air. Sensationally, too, her ardour
for the exercise of her inherited gifts attributed it to him that her
father's daughter had lived the mean existence in England, pursuing a
husband, hounded by a mother's terrors. The influences environing her
and pressing her to submission sharpened her perusal of the small
object largely endowed by circumstances to demand it. She stood calmly
discoursing, with a tempered smile: no longer a novice in the social
manner. An equal whom he had injured waited for his remarks, gave ready
replies; and he, bowing to the visible equality, chafed at a sense of
inferiority following his acknowledgement of it. He was alone with her,
and next to dumb; she froze a full heart. As for his heart, it could not
speak at all, it was a swinging lump. The rational view of the situation
was exposed to her; and she listened to that favourably, or at least
attentively; but with an edge to her civil smile when he hinted of
entertainments, voyages, travels, an excursion to her native mountain
land. Her brother would then be facing death. The rational view, she
admitted, was one to be considered. Yes, they were married; they had
a son; they were bound to sink misunderstandings, in the interests of
their little son. He ventured to say that the child was a link uniting
them; and she looked at him. He blinked rapidly, as she had seen him
do of late, but kept his eyes on her through the nervous flutter of the
lids; his pride making a determined stand for physical mastery, though
her look was but a look. Had there been reproach in it, he would have
found the voice to speak out. Her look was a cold sky above a hungering
man. She froze his heart from the marble of her own.

And because she was for adventuring with her brother at bloody work of
civil war in the pay of a foreign government!--he found a short refuge
in that mute sneer, and was hurled from it by an apparition of