‘For a year or more.’
‘Fond of her?’
‘All my heart.’
‘In love!’
‘Yes, in love. The proof of it is, I ‘ve asked her now I can support her as a cottager leaning on the Three Per Cents.’
‘Well, it helps you to a human kind of talk. It carries out your theories. I never disbelieved in your honesty. The wisdom’s another matter. Did you ever tell any one, that there’s not an act of a man’s life lies dead behind him, but it is blessing or cursing him every step he takes?’
‘By that,’ rejoined Gower, ‘I can say Lord Feltre proves there’s wisdom in the truisms of devoutness.’
He thought the Catholic lord had gone a step or two to catch an eel.
Fleetwood was looking on the backward of his days, beholding a melancholy sunset, with a grimace in it.
‘Lord Feltre might show you the “leanness of Philosophy”;—you would learn from hearing him:—“an old gnawed bone for the dog that chooses to be no better than a dog.”’