and I don't think you deserved it. However, there was just the chance to
stop a run to perdition. But, Madge? Madge? I'd swear to the girl!'

'Not so hard as I,' said Gower, and spoke of the oath to come between the
girl and him.

Fleetwood's dive into the girl's eyes drew her before him. He checked a
spirt of exclamations.

'You fancy the brute had a crack for revenge and mistook his man?'

'That's what I want her ladyship to know,' said Gower.

'How could you let her hear of it?'

'Nothing can be concealed from her.'

The earl was impressionable to the remark, in his disgust at the
incident. It added a touch of a new kind of power to her image.

'She's aware of my coming?'

'To-day or to-morrow.'

They scaled the phaeton and drove.

'You undervalue Lord Feltre. You avoid your adversaries,' Fleetwood now
rebuked his hearer. 'It 's an easy way to have the pull of them in your
own mind. You might learn from him. He's willing for controversy.
Nature-worship--or "aboriginal genuflexion," he calls it; Anglicanism,