s. But, if a young woman out alone in the woods
was hardly to be counted among the well-born, she held rank above them.
Her face and bearing might really be taken to symbolize the forest life.
She was as individual a representative as the Tragic and Comic masks, and
should be got to stand between them for sign of the naturally
straight-growing untrained, a noble daughter of the woods.

Not comparable to Henrietta in feminine beauty, she was on an upper
plateau, where questions as to beauty are answered by other than the
shallow aspect of a girl. But would Henrietta eclipse her if they were
side by side? Fleetwood recalled the strange girl's face. There was in it
a savage poignancy in serenity unexampled among women--or modern women.
One might imagine an apotheosis of a militant young princess of Goths or
Vandals, the glow of blessedness awakening her martial ardours through
the languor of the grave:--Woodseer would comprehend and hit on the exact
image to portray her in a moment, Fleetwood thought, and longed for that
fellow.

He walked hurriedly back to the stunted rock tree. The damsel had
vanished. He glanced below. She had not fallen. He longed to tell
Woodseer he had seen a sort of Carinthia sister, cousin, one of the
family. A single glimpse of her had raised him out of his grovelling
perturbations, cooled and strengthened him, more than diverting the
course of the poison Henrietta infused, and to which it disgraced him to
be so subject. He took love unmanfully; the passion struck at his
weakness; in wrath at the humiliation, if only to revenge himself for
that, he could be fiendish; he knew it, and loathed the desired fair
creature who caused and exposed to him these cracks in his nature, whence
there came a brimstone stench of the infernal pits. And he was made for
better. Of this he was right well assured. Superior to station and to
wealth, to all mundane advantages, he was the puppet of a florid puppet
girl; and he had slept at the small inn of a village hard by, because it
was intolerable to him to see the face that had been tearful over her
lover's departure, and hear her praises of the man she trusted to keep
his word, however grievously she wounded him.

He was the prisoner of his word;--rather like the donkeys known as
married men: rather more honourable than most of them. He had to be
present at the ball at the Schloss and behold his loathed Henrietta,
suffer torture of chains to the rack, by reason of