The wish to look on Steignton had been spoken or sighed for during long years between Aminta and her aunt, until finally shame and anger clinched the subject.  To look on Steignton for once was now Aminta’s phrasing of her sudden resolve; it appeared as a holiday relief from recent worries, and it was an expedition with an aim, though she had but the coldest curiosity to see the place, and felt alien to it.  Yet the thought, never to have seen Steignton! roused phantoms of dead wishes to drive the strange engine she was, faster than the living would have done.  Her reason for haste was rationally founded on the suddenness of her resolve, which, seeing that she could not say she desired to go, seemed to come of an external admonition; and it counselled quick movements, lest her inspired obedience to the prompting should as abruptly breathe itself out.  ‘And in that case I shall never have seen Steignton at all,’ she said, with perfect calmness, and did not attempt to sound her meaning.

She did know that she was a magazine of a great storage of powder.  It banked inoffensively dry.  She had forgiven her lord, owning the real nobleman he was in courtesy to women, whom his inherited ideas of them so quaintly minimized and reduced to pretty insect or tricky reptile.  They, too, had the choice of being ultimately the one or the other in fact; the latter most likely.

If, however, she had forgiven her lord, the shattering of their union was the cost of forgiveness.  In letting him stand high, as the lofty man she had originally worshipped, she separated herself from him, to feel that the humble she was of a different element, as a running water at a mountain’s base.  They are one in the landscape; they are far from one in reality.  Aminta’s pride of being chafed at the yoke of marriage.

Her aunt was directed to prepare for a start at an early hour the next morning.  Mrs. Pagnell wrote at her desk, and fussed, and ordered the posting chariot, and bewailed herself submissively; for it was the Countess of Ormont speaking when Aminta delivered commands, and the only grievance she dared to mutter was ‘the unexpectedness.’  Her letters having been despatched, she was amazed in the late evening to hear Aminta give the footman orders for the chariot to be ready at the door an hour earlier than the hour previously appointed.  She remonstrated.  Aminta simply observed that it would cause less inconvenience to all parties.  A suspicion of her aunt’s proceedings was confirmed by the good woman’s flustered state.  She refrained from smiling.

She would have mustered courage to invite Matthew Weyburn as her escort, if he had been at hand.  He was attending to his affairs with lawyers—­ mainly with his friend Mr. Abner.  She studied map and gazetteer till late into the night.  Giving her orders to the postillion on the pavement in the morning, she named a South-westerly direction out of London, and after entering the chariot, she received a case from one of the footmen.