‘She loves her brother. He’s an officer. He’s away on honeymoon. There ‘s an admiral down Hampshire way, a place I’ve been near and seen. I’d not have you go to any of them, sir, without trying all we can do to find Lord Fleetwood. It’s Admiral Fakenham she speaks of; she’s fond of him. She’s not minded to bother any of her friends about herself.’ ‘I shall see you to-night,’ said Gower, and set his face Westward, remembering that his father had named Caermarthen as her mother’s birthplace. Just in that tone of hers do Welshwomen talk of their country; of its history, when at home, of its mountains, when exiled: and in a language like hers, bare of superlatives to signify an ardour conveyed by the fire of the breath. Her quick devotion to a lady exciting enthusiasm through admiring pity for the grace of a much-tried quiet sweetness, was explained; apart from other reasons, feminine or hidden, which might exist. Only a Welsh girl would be so quick and all in it, with a voice intimating a heated cauldron under her mouth. None but a Welsh-blooded girl, risking her good name to follow and nurse the man she considered a hero, would carry her head to look virgin eyes as she did. One could swear to them, Gower thought. Contact with her spirited him out of his mooniness. He had the Cymric and Celtic respect of character; which puts aside the person’s environments to face the soul. He was also an impressionable fellow among his fellows, a philosopher only at his leisure, in his courted solitudes. Getting away some strides from this girl of the drilling voice,--the shudder-voice, he phrased it,--the lady for whom she pleaded came clearer into his view and gradually absorbed him; though it was an emulation with the girl Madge, of which he was a trifle conscious, that drove him to do his work of service in the directest manner. He then fancied the girl had caught something of the tone of her lady: the savage intensity or sincerity; and he brooded on Carinthia’s position, the mixture of the astounding and the woful in her misadventure. One could almost laugh at our human fate, to think of a drop off the radiant mountain heights upon a Whitechapel greengrocer’s shop, gathering the title of countess midway.