A flash came out of her dark eyes.

’No, you guess wrong this time, you clever shrew!  I wormed nothing from you,’ said he.  ’I knew you kept particular letters in that receptacle of things of price:  Aminta can’t conceal.  The man has worried you.  Why not have come to me?’

‘Oblige me, my lord, by restoring me my box.’

‘This is your box.’

Her bosom lifted with the words Oh, no! unspoken.  He took the key and opened the box.  A dazzling tray of stones was revealed; underneath it the constellations in cases, very heavens for the worldly Eve; and he doubted that Eve could have gone completely out of her.  But she had, as observation instructed him, set her woman’s mind on something else, and must have it before letting her eyes fall on objects impossible for any of her sex to see without coveting them.

He bowed.  ‘I will fetch it,’ he said magnanimously.  Her own box was brought from his room.  She then consented to look womanly at the Ormont jewels, over which the battle; whereof she knew nothing, and nothing could be told her, had been fought in her interests, for her sovereign pleasure.

She looked and admired.  They were beautiful jewels the great emerald was wonderful, and there were two rubies to praise.  She excused herself for declining to put the circlet for the pendant round her neck, or a glittering ring on her finger.  Her remarks were encomiums, not quite so cold as those of a provincial spinster of an ascetic turn at an exhibition of the world’s flycatcher gewgaws.  He had divided Aminta from the Countess of Ormont, and it was the wary Aminta who set a guard on looks and tones before the spectacle of his noble bounty, lest any, the smallest, payment of the dues of the countess should be demanded.  Rightly interpreting him to be by nature incapable of asking pardon, or acknowledging a wrong done by him, however much he might crave exemption from blame and seek for peace, she kept to her mask of injury, though she hated unforgivingness; and she felt it little, she did it easily, because her heart was dead to the man.  My lord’s hand touched her on her shoulder, propitiatingly in some degree, in his dumb way.

Offended women can be emotional to a towering pride, that bends while it assumes unbendingness:  it must come to their sensations, as it were a sign of humanity in the majestic, speechless king of beasts; and they are pathetically melted, abjectly hypocritical; a nice confusion of sentiments, traceable to a tender bosom’s appreciation of strength and the perceptive compassion for its mortality.

In a case of the alienated wife, whose blood is running another way, no foul snake’s bite is more poisonous than that indicatory touch, however simple and slight.  My lord’s hand, lightly laid on Aminta’s shoulder, became sensible of soft warm flesh stiffening to the skeleton.

CHAPTER XXIV