The pleading was crafty, and it was penetrative in the avoidance of stress. Carinthia shook herself to feel moved. The endeavour chilled her to a notion that she was but half alive. She let the question approach her, whether Chillon could pardon Lord Fleetwood. She, with no idea of benignness, might speak pardon’s word to him, on a late autumn evening years hence, perhaps, or to his friends to-morrow, if he would considerately keep distant. She was upheld by the thought of her brother’s more honourable likeness to their father, in the certainty of his refusal to speak pardon’s empty word or touch an offending hand, without their father’s warrant for the injury wiped out; and as she had no wish for that to be done, she could anticipate his withholding of the word. For her brother at wrestle with his fallen fortunes was now the beating heart of Carinthia’s mind. Her husband was a shadow there. He did obscure it, and he might annoy, he was unable to set it in motion. He sat there somewhat like Youth’s apprehension of Death:--the dark spot seen mistily at times through people’s tears, or visioned as in an ambush beyond the hills; occasionally challenged to stimulate recklessness; oftener overlooked, acknowledged for the undesired remote of life’s conditions, life’s evil, fatal, ill-assorted yoke-fellow; and if it was in his power to burst out of his corner and be terrible to her, she could bring up a force unnamed and unmeasured, that being the blood of her father in her veins. Having done her utmost to guard her babe, she said her prayers; she stood for peace or the struggle. ‘Does Lord Fleetwood speak of coming here?’ she said. ‘To-morrow.’ ‘I go to Croridge to-morrow.’ ‘Your ladyship returns?’ ‘Yes, I return Mr. Gower, you have fifty minutes before you dress for dinner.’ He thought only of the exceeding charity of the intimation; and he may be excused for his not seeing the feminine full answer it was, in an implied, unmeditated contrast. He went gladly to find his new comrade, his flower among grass-blades, the wonderful creature astonishing him and surcharging his world by setting her face at him, opening her breast to him, breathing a young man’s word of words from a woman’s mouth. His flower among grass-blades for a head looking studiously down, she was his fountain of wisdom as well, in the assurance she gave him of the wisdom of his choice.