my lord?'

'You ought to know them by this time, you dolt,' returned his patron,
and complimented him on his bearing in the fight. 'You shall have your
two hundred, and something will be added. Hold handy here till I mount.
I start in ten minutes.'

Whether to speak a polite adieu to the bride, whose absurd position
she had brought on her own head, was debated for half a minute. He
considered that the wet chalk-quarry of a beauty had at all events the
merit of not being a creature to make scenes. He went up to the sitting-
room. If she was not there, he would leave his excuses.

She was there, and seated; neither crying, nor smiling, nor pointedly
serious in any way, not conventionally at her ease either. And so
clearly was he impressed by her transparency in simplicity of expression,
that he took without a spurn at it the picture of a woman half drained
of her blood, veiling the wound. And a young woman, a stranger to
suffering: perhaps--as the creatures do looking for the usual flummery
tenderness, what they call happiness; wondering at the absence of it and
the shifty ghost of a husband she has got by floundering into the bog
known as Marriage. She would have it, and here she was!

He entered the situation and was possessed by the shivering delicacy
of it. Surface emotions were not seen on her. She might be a creature
with a soul. Here and there the thing has been found in women. It is
priceless when found, and she could not be acting. One might swear the
creature had no power to act.

She spoke without offence, the simplest of words, affected no