er alone.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Georgiana Ford would have had little claim among the fair saints to be
accepted by them as one of their order. Her reputation for coldness was
derived from the fact of her having stood a siege from Captain Gambier.
But she loved a creature of earth too well to put up a hand for saintly
honours. The passion of her life centred in devotion to her half-brother.
Those who had studied her said, perhaps with a touch of malignity, that
her religious instinct had its source in a desire to gain some place of
intercession for him. Merthyr had leaned upon it too often to doubt the
strength of it, whatever its purity might be. She, when barely more than
a child (a girl of sixteen), had followed him over the then luckless
Italian fields--sacrificing as much for a cause that she held to be
trivial, as he in the ardour of his half-fanatical worship. Her theory
was: "These Italians are in bondage, and since heaven permits it, there
has been guilt. By endurance they are strengthened, by suffering
chastened; so let them endure and suffer." She would cleave to this view
with many variations of pity. Merthyr's experience was tolerant to the
weaker vessel's young delight in power, which makes her sometimes, though
sweet and merciful by nature, enunciate Hebraic severities oracularly. He
smiled, and was never weary of pointing out practical refutations.
Whereat she said, "Will a thousand instances change the principle?" When
the brain, and especially the fine brain of a woman, first begins to act
for itself, the work is of heavy labour; she finds herself plunging
abroad on infinite seas, and runs speedily into the anchorage of dogmas,
obfuscatory saws, and what she calls principles. Here she is safe; but if
her thinking was not originally the mere action of lively blood upon that
battery of intelligence, she will by-and-by reflect that it is not well
for a live thing to be tied to a dead, and that long clinging to safety
confesses too much. Merthyr waited for Georgians patiently. On all other
points they were heart-in-heart. It was her pride to say that she loved
him with no sense of jealousy, and prayed that he might find a woman, in
plain words, worthy of him. This woman had not been found; she confessed
that she had never seen her.

Georgians received Captain Gambier's communication in Monmouth. Merthyr
had now and then written of a Miss Belloni; but he had seemed to refer to
a sort of child, and Georgia