But again, if the girl has breeding to some extent, he might think it her due that she should pass under the safeguard of his name, out of sight.

Then, so far the report is trustworthy.  We blow the rumour out of belief.  A young woman there is:  she is not a wife.  Lady Charlotte allowed her the fairly respectable post of Hecate of the Shades, as long as the girl was no pretender to the place and name in the upper sphere.  Her deductions were plausible, convincing to friends shaken by her vehement manner of coming at them.  She convinced herself by means of her multitude of reasons for not pursuing inquiry.  Her brother said nothing.  There was no need for him to speak.  He seemed on one or two occasions in the act of getting himself together for the communication of a secret; and she made ready to listen hard, with ears, eyebrows, shut month, and a gleam at the back of her eyes, for a signification of something she would refer him to after he had spoken.  He looked at her and held his peace, or virtually held it,—­that is, he said not one word on the subject she was to have told him she had anticipated.  Lady Charlotte ascribed it to his recollection of the quick blusher, the pained blusher, she was in her girlhood at mention or print of the story of men and women.  Who, not having known her, could conceive it!  But who could conceive that, behind the positive, plain-dealing, downright woman of the world, there was at times, when a nerve was touched or an old blocked path of imagination thrown open, a sensitive youthfulness; still quick to blush as far as the skin of a grandmother matron might show it!

CHAPTER III.

THE TUTOR

There was no counting now on Lord Ormont’s presence in the British gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows return to their eaves.  He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one of the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had flown, and London’s indiscriminate people went about without their volatile heads.

Lady Charlotte put these changed conditions upon the behaviour of the military authorities to her brother, saying that the wonder was he did not shake the dust of his country from his feet.  In her wise head she rejoiced to think he was not the donkey she sketched for admiration; and she was partly consoled, or played at the taking of a comfort needed in her perpetual struggle with a phantom of a fact, by the reflection that a young woman on his arm would tense him to feel himself more at home abroad.  Her mind’s habit of living warmly beside him in separation was vexed by the fixed intrusion of a female third person, who checked the run of intimate chatter, especially damped the fancied talk over early days—­of which the creature was ignorant; and her propinquity to him arrested or broke the dialogue Lady Charlotte invented and pressed to renew.  But a wife, while letting him be seen, would have insisted on appropriating the thought of him—­all his days, past as well as present.  An impassioned sister’s jealousy preferred that it should not be a wife reigning to dispute her share of her brother in imagination.