‘What is that, my dear?’ said Mrs. Pagnell.

Aminta unlocked and laid it open.  A pair of pistols met Mrs. Pagnell’s gaze.

‘We shan’t be in need of those things?’ the lady said anxiously.

‘One never knows, on the road, aunt.’

‘Loaded?  You wouldn’t hesitate to fire; I’m sure.’

‘At Mr. Morsfield himself, if he attempted to stop me.’

Mrs. Pagnell withdrew into her astonishment, and presently asked, in a tone of some indignation:  ‘Why did you mention Mr. Morsfield, Aminta?’

‘Did you not write to him yesterday afternoon, aunt?’

‘You read the addresses on my letters!’

’Did you not supply him with our proposed route and the time for starting?’

‘Pistols!’ exclaimed Mrs. Pagnell.  ’One would fancy you think we are in the middle of the last century.  Mr. Morsfield is a gentleman, not a highwayman.’

‘He gives the impression of his being a madman.’

‘The real madman is your wedded husband, Aminta, if wedding it was!’

It was too surely so, in Aminta’s mind.  She tried, by looking out of the window, to forget her companion.  The dullness of the roads and streets opening away to flat fields combined with the postillion’s unvarying jog to sicken her thoughts over the exile from London she was undergoing, and the chance that Matthew Weyburn might call at a vacant house next day, to announce his term of service to the earl, whom he had said he much wanted to see.  He said it in his sharp manner when there was decision behind it.  Several times after contemplating the end of her journey, and not perceiving any spot of pleasure ahead, an emotion urged her to turn back; for the young are acutely reasoning when their breasts advise them to quit a road where no pleasure beckons.

Unlike Matthew Weyburn, the tiptoe sparkle of a happy mind did not leap from her at wayside scenes, a sweep of grass, distant hills, clouds in flight.  She required, since she suffered, the positive of events or blessings to kindle her glow.

Matthew Weyburn might call at the house.  Would he be disappointed?  He had preserved her letters of the old school-days.  She had burnt his.  But she had not burnt the letters of Mr. Morsfield; and she cared nothing for that man.  Assuredly she merited the stigma branding women as crack-brained.  Yet she was not one of the fools; she could govern a household, and she liked work, she had the capacity for devotedness.  So, therefore, she was a woman perverted by her position, and she shook her bonds in revolt from marriage.  Imagining a fall down some suddenly spied chasm of her nature, she had a sisterly feeling for the women named sinful.  At the same time, reflecting that they are sinful only with the sinful, she knelt thankfully at the feet of the man who had saved her from such danger.  Tears threatened.  They were a poor atonement for the burning of his younger letters.  But not he—­she