’Drive as fast as you can pelt for Dornton.  I’m doing my lord’s commands.’

‘Trust yourself to me, madam.’  His hand stretched for Aminta to mount.  She took it without a word and climbed to the seat.  A clatter of hoofs rang out with the crack of the whip.  They were away behind a pair of steppers that could go the pace.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PURSUERS

For promptitude, the lady, the gentleman, and the coachman were in such unison as to make it a reasonable deduction that the flight had been concerted.

Never did any departure from the Roebuck leave so wide-mouthed a body of spectators.  Mrs. Pagnell’s shrieks of ‘Stop, oh! stop!’ to the backs of the coachman and Aminta were continued until they were far down the street.  She called to the innkeeper, called to the landlady and to invisible constables for help.  But her pangs were childish compared with Morsfield’s, who, with the rage of a conceited schemer tricked and the fury of a lover beholding the rape of his beautiful, bellowed impotently at Weyburn and the coachman out of hearing, ‘Stop! you!’ He was in the state of men who believe that there is a virtue in imprecations, and he shot loud oaths after them, shook his fist, cursed his friend Cumnock, whose name he vociferated as a summons to him,—­generally the baffled plotter misconducted himself to an extreme degree, that might have apprised Mrs. Pagnell of a more than legitimate disappointment on his part.

Pursuit was one of the immediate ideas which rush forward to look back woefully on impediments and fret to fever over the tardiness of operations.  A glance at the thing of wrinkles receiving orders to buckle at his horses and pursue convinced them of the hopelessness; and Morsfield was pricked to intensest hatred of the woman by hearing the dire exclamation, ‘One night, and her character’s gone!’

‘Be quiet, ma’am, if you please, or nothing can be done,’ he cried.

’I tell you, Mr. Morsfield—­don’t you see?—­he has thrown them together.  It is Lord Ormont’s wicked conspiracy to rid himself of her.  A secretary!  He’ll beat any one alive in plots.  She can’t show her face in London after this, if you don’t overtake her.  And she might have seen Lord Ormont’s plot to ruin her.  He tired of her, and was ashamed of her inferior birth to his own, after the first year, except on the Continent, where she had her rights.  Me he never forgave for helping make him the happy man he might have been in spite of his age.  For she is lovely!  But it’s worse for a lovely woman with a damaged reputation.  And that ’s his cunning.  How she could be so silly as to play into it!  She can’t have demeaned herself to look on that secretary!  I said from the first he seemed as if thrown into her way for a purpose.  But she has pride:  my niece Aminta has pride.  She might well have listened to flatterers—­she had every temptation—­if it hadn’t