em, though earth be shaken. Dragged into the monstrous grotesque of the
scene at the Gardens, Livia and Henrietta went through the ordeal,
masking any signs that they were stripped for a flagellation. Only, the
fair cousins were unable to perceive a comic element in the scene: and if
the world was for laughing, as their instant apprehension foresaw it, the
world was an ignoble beast. They did not discuss Carinthia's latest
craziness at night, hardly alluded to it while they were in the
interjectory state.

Henrietta was Livia's guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna:
'To get money! money!' her angry bluntness explained his absence, and
dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had
fallen. She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible
economy:--'think of the smallest trifles!' so that her Chillon travelled
unaccompanied, they were separated. Her iterations upon money were the
vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers.
She, the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck a
line between poor and rich in her talk of people, and classed herself
with the fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the
enforced calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings; and
that miserly Lord Levellier's indebtedness to Chillon--large sums! and
Chillon's praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father's
estate; and of how he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the
money he had given Janey--weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance;
but her brother would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had been
for weeks, because of her stubborn resistance to the earl--quite
unreasonably, whether right or wrong--in the foul retreat she had chosen;
apparently with a notion that the horror of it was her vantage ground
against him: and though a single sign of submission would place the
richest purse in England at her disposal. 'She refuses Esslemont! She
insists on his meeting her! No child could be so witless. Let him be the
one chiefly or entirely to blame, she might show a little tact--for her
brother's sake! She loves her brother? No: deaf to him, to me, to every
consideration except her blind will.'

Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had expected.

It refreshed a phlegmatic lady's disposition for prophecy. Lovers
abruptly tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but