her far than the
philosopher's milk of Mother Nature's bosom. There flamed the burning
signal of release from his torments; there his absolving refuge, instead
of his writing fruitless, intricate, impossible stuff to a woman. The
letter was renounced and shredded: the dedicated ascetic contemplated a
hooded shape, washed of every earthly fleck. It proved how men may by
power of grip squeeze raptures out of pain.

CHAPTER XLV

CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT HAPPENED

The Dame is at her thumps for attention to be called to 'the strangeness
of it,' that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet, on the
most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land, should at
this period become 'the cynosure of a city beautifully named by the poet
Great Augusta, and truly indeed the world's metropolis.'

Put aside her artful pother to rouse excitement at stages of a narrative,
London's general eye upon little Croridge was but another instance of the
extraordinary and not so wonderful. Lady Arpington, equal to a Parliament
in herself, spoke of the place and the countess courted by her repentant
lord. Brailstone and Chumley Potts were town criers of the executioner
letter each had received from the earl; Potts with his chatter of a
suicide's pistol kept loaded in a case under a two-inch-long silver
Cross, and with sundry dramatic taps on the forehead, Jottings over the
breast, and awful grimace of devoutness. There was no mistaking him. The
young nobleman of the millions was watched; the town spyglass had him in
its orbit. Tales of the ancestral Fleetwoods ran beside rumours of a
Papist priest at the bedside of the Foredoomed to Error's dying mother.
His wealth was counted, multiplied by the ready naughts of those who know
little and dread much. Sir Meeson Corby referred to an argument Lord
Fleetwood had held on an occasion hotly against the logical consistency
of the Protestant faith; and to his alarm lest some day 'all that immense
amount of money should slip away from us to favour the machinations of
Roman Catholicism!' The Countess of Cressett, Livia, anticipated her no
surprise at anything Lord Fleetwood might do: she knew him.

So thereupon, with the whirr of a covey on wing before the fowler, our
crested three of immemorial antiquity and a presumptive immortality, the
Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, shot up again, hooting across the
dormant chief city Old England's