The poor fellow may have laughed himself--there was no guessing what emotions that curtain of flesh concealed--but he looked, if anything, more abashed than offended. “Hush!” said George, recovering himself, “or I must drag you back, miss.” We shook, facing one another with gleaming eyes and teeth. “Didn’t I tell you,” he gasped, “that he was a thread-paper of a man once?” He went and clapped a hand on the mountain’s shoulder. “Come, Johnny, no offence,” said he. “None knows better than her ladyship that your heart’s in the right place.” I subdued myself by a vast effort, and rose, and went to conciliate the poor creature. “Haven’t I reason to?” I said. “And--and I put my faith in you, sir; and--and faith moves mountains”--and I was near off again. He shifted, and flushed faintly, and delivered himself once more. “’Tis the wittles--have done it.” “He means,” said George, “that he’s made up for lost time and opportunities, since his promotion.” “Ay, ’twas the nerves,” went on the oracle--“kep’ me down--once. Shook, I did--hear thunder. Walk a mile round--avoid row. When the crows holloa’d--see funeral pass--turned blood water. ’Twas lack ballast--that was it.” “Of course,” said George, “that was it. What a coward you was, Johnny, in your thin time. D’you remember the day we shot the home covers, with a great person for company, and the sky came raining cobwebs, so that we were near stifled with ’em; and you stuck your head in a bush, till we gave you with our ramrods something better than cobwebs to roar about?” “Ay, I do,” said the mountain, and rumbled again. “Not much cobweb--’bout me now.” Well, I told him that one couldn’t have too much of a good thing; and very soon we were fast friends. But that morning George haled me back into shelter before much was said; and afterwards our acquaintance ripened by fits and starts. The very immobility of the creature was our and his salvation. There was no conscious expression to betray itself on that vast desert of a countenance. Periodically, he was visited by the steward; fitfully, by units of the hunt which his lordship sought to lay on his vanished brother’s trail. He was never, so far as I knew, suspected; and with the deepening of winter the chase slackened. And, in the meantime, what was I doing there, buried alive like a recreant novice in the wall? Wilt thou believe, Alcide, that I, with all my free aspirations, could have remained at peace in the little prison for a day? Well, with rare excursions beyond, and those not till I had been long immured, I lived there for more than a year, and was near all the time as happy as a swallow under the eaves. It is love makes the dimensions of our estate. XX. I PUT AN END TO FOLLY NUMBER TWO