hen it was a simple trot of the hussars ahead; way was made
for him.

Now, to see what banquet there is for the big of heart in the world's hot
stress, take the view of Carinthia, to whom her brother's thoughtful
little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke was
divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future an
unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.

CHAPTER XXXI

WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN

The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her
detestation of imagerial epigrams. Otherwise Gower Woodseer's dash at the
quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of it
further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a 'devil on his
back on a river' was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and
teaser.

Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which drew
the breath from him;--and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and
gurgle of the nurses, he could swear. He kicked at the bondage to our
common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal.
But there had been a mother to his father: odd movements of a warmish
curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard. They were,
it seemed, external--no part of him: like blasts of a wayside furnace
across wintry air. They were, as it chanced, Nature's woman in him
plucking at her separated partner, Custom's man; something of an oriental
voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the pleasures
without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life's convict couple
walk linked to one another, to their issue more.

There was also a cold curiosity to see the male infant such a mother
would have. The grandson of Old Lawless might turn out a rascal,--he
would be no mean one, no coward.

That mother, too, who must have been a touch astonished to find herself a
mother:--Fleetwood laughed a curt bark, and heard rebukes, and pleaded
the marriage-trap to the man of his word; devil and cherub were at the
tug, or say, dog and gentleman, a survival of the schoolboy--that mother,
a girl of the mountains, perhaps wanted no more than smoothing by the
world. 'It is my husband' sounded foolish, sounded freshish,--a new note.
Would she repeat it? The bit of simplicity would bear repeating once.
Gower Woodseer says the creature grows and studies to perfect herself.
She's a good