He picks up stray flower-blossoms from the
carpet, and mutters to himself as discontentedly
as if they were hot cinders burning holes in it;
and he storms at the servants, if there is a
crease in the tablecloth, or a knife missing from
its place at the dinner-table, as fiercely as if
they had personally insulted him.

I have already referred to the small annoyances
which appear to have troubled him. since
his return. Much of the alteration for the
worse which I have noticed in him, may be due
to these. I try to persuade myself that it is so,
because I am anxious not to be disheartened
already about the future. It is certainly trying
to any man's temper to be met by a vexation the
moment he sets foot in his own house again,
after a long absence; and this annoying circumstance
did really happen to Sir Percival in my
presence. On the evening of their arrival, the
housekeeper followed me into the hall to receive
her master and mistress and their guests. The
instant he saw her, Sir Percival asked if any
one had called lately. The housekeeper mentioned
to him, in reply, what she had previously
mentioned to me, the visit of the strange gentleman
to make inquiries about the time of her
master's return. He asked immediately for the
gentleman's name. No name had been left.
The gentleman's business? No business had
been mentioned. What was the gentleman
like? The housekeeper tried to describe him;
but failed to distinguish the nameless visitor by
any personal peculiarity which her master could
recognise. Sir Percival frowned, stamped angrily
on the floor, and walked on into the house, taking
no notice of anybody. Why he should have
been so discomposed by a trifle I cannot say—
but he was seriously discomposed, beyond all
doubt.

Upon the whole, it will be best, perhaps, if I
abstain from forming a decisive opinion of his
manners, language, and conduct in his own
house, until time has enabled him to shake off
the anxieties, whatever they may be, which now
evidently trouble his mind in secret. I will
turn over to a new page; and my pen shall let
Laura's husband alone for the present.

The two guests— the Count and Countess
Fosco— come next in my catalogue. I will dispose
of the Countess first, so as to have done
with the woman as soon as possible.

Laura was certainly not chargeable with any
exaggeration, in writing me word that I should
hardly recognise her aunt again, when we met.
Never before have I beheld such a change produced
in a woman by her marriage as has been
produced in Madame Fosco. As Eleanor Fairlie
(aged seven-and-thirty), she was always talking
pretentious nonsense, and always worrying the
unfortunate men with every small exaction
which a vain and foolish woman can impose on
long-suffering male humanity. As Madame
Fosco (aged three-and-forty), she sits for hours
together without saying a word, frozen up in
the strangest manner in herself. The hideously
ridiculous love-locks which used to hang on
either side of her face, are now replaced by stiff
little rows of very short curls, of the sort that
one sees in old-fashioned wigs. A plain, matronly
cap covers her head, and makes her look,
for the first time in her life, since I remember
her, like a decent woman. Nobody (putting
her husband out of the question, of course) now
sees in her, what everybody once saw— I mean
the structure of the female skeleton, in the
upper regions of the collar-bones and the shoulder-blades.
Clad in quiet black or grey gowns,
made high round the throat— dresses that she
would have laughed at, or screamed at, as the
whim of the moment inclined her, in her maiden
days— she sits speechless in corners; her dry
white hands (so dry that the pores of her skin
look chalky) incessantly engaged, either in
monotonous embroidery work, or in rolling
up endless little cigarettes for the Count's
own particular smoking. On the few occasions,
when her cold blue eyes are off her work,
they are generally turned on her husband,
with the look of mute submissive inquiry which
we are all familiar with in the eyes of a faithful
dog. The only approach to an inward thaw
which I have yet detected under her outer covering
of icy constraint, has betrayed itself, once or
twice, in the form of a suppressed tigerish
jealousy of any woman in the house (the maids
included) to whom the Count speaks, or on
whom he looks, with anything approaching to
special interest or attention. Except in this
one particular, she is always, morning, noon,
and night, in-doors and out, fair weather or foul,
as cold as a statue, and as impenetrable as the
stone out of which it is cut. For the common
purposes of society the extraordinary change
thus produced in her, is, beyond all doubt, a
change for the better, seeing that it has transformed
her into a civil, silent, unobtrusive
woman, who is never in the way. How far she
is really reformed or deteriorated in her secret
self, is another question. I have once or twice
seen sudden changes of expression on her
pinched lips, and heard sudden inflexions of
tone in her calm voice, which have led me to
suspect that her present state of suppression
may have sealed up something dangerous in her
nature, which used to evaporate harmlessly in
the freedom of her former life. It is quite
possible that I may be altogether wrong in this
idea. My own impression, however, is, that I
am right. Time will show.

And the magician who has wrought this wonderful
transformation— the foreign husband who
has tamed this once wayward Englishwoman till
her own relations hardly know her again— the
Count himself? What of the Count?

This, in two words: He looks like a man
who could tame anything. If he had married a
tigress, instead of a woman, he would have
tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I
should have made his cigarettes as his wife
does— I should have held my tongue when he
looked at me, as she holds hers.

I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these
secret pages. The man has interested me, has
attracted me, has forced me to like him. ln