Mrs. Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was the way with her after a snub.  She now resumed her gossip of the naughty world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really indefensible brazen Mrs. Amy May, who was only the daughter of a half-pay naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they say, decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but somewhere else.  She spread all sorts of report, about Mr. Morsfield, and he was honour itself in his reserve about her.  ’Depend upon it, Aminta—­he was not more than a boy then, and they say she aimed at her enfranchisement by plotting the collision, for his Yorkshire revenues are immense, and he is, you know, skilful in the use of arms, and Captain May has no resources whatever:  penury! no one cares to speculate how they contrive!—­but while that dreadful duelling—­and my lord as bad as any in his day-exists, depend upon it, an unscrupulous good-looking woman has as many lives for her look of an eye or lift of a finger as a throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.’

Aminta wished to dream.  She gave her aunt a second dose, and the lady relapsed again.

Power to dream had gone.  She set herself to look at roadside things, cottage gardens, old housewives in doorways, gaffer goodman meeting his crony on the path, groups of boys and girls.  She would take the girls, Matthew Weyburn the boys.  She had lessons to give to girls, she had sympathy, pity, anticipation.  That would be a life of happy service.  It might be a fruitful trial of the system he proposed, to keep the boys and girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games.  His was the larger view.  Her lord’s view appeared similar to that of her aunt’s ‘throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.’  Matthew Weyburn believed in the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief like it.

Presently Mrs. Pagnell returned to the charge, and once more she was nipped, and irritated to declare she had never known her niece’s temper so provoking.  Aminta was launching a dream of a lass she had seen in a field, near a white hawthorn, standing upright, her left arm aloft round the pole of a rake, the rim of her bonnet tipped on her forehead; an attitude of a rustic.

Britannia with helmet heeling at dignity.  The girl’s eyes hung to the passing chariot, without movement of her head.  It was Aminta who looked back, and she saw the girl looking away.  Among the superior dames and damsels she had seen, there was not one to match that figure for stately air, gallant ease, and splendour of pose.  Matthew Weyburn would have admired the girl.  Aminta did better than envy, she cast off the last vestiges of her bitter ambition to be a fine lady, and winged into the bosom of the girl, and not shyly said ‘yes’ to Matthew Weyburn, and to herself, deep in herself:  ‘A maid has no need to be shy.’  Hardly