An incident, considered grave even in the days of the duel and the kicks against a swelling public reprehension of the practice, occurred to postpone her drive for four-and-twenty hours.  London was shaken by rumours of a tragic mishap to a socially well-known gentleman at the Chiallo fencing rooms.  The rumours passing from mouth to mouth acquired, in the nature of them, sinister colours as they circulated.  Lord Ormont sent Aminta word of what he called ‘a bad sort of accident at Chiallo’s,’ without mentioning names or alluding to suspicions.

He treated it lightly.  He could not have written of it with such unconcern if it involved the secretary!  Yet Aminta did seriously ask herself whether he could; and she flew rapidly over the field of his character, seizing points adverse, points favourably advocative, balancing dubiously—­most unjustly:  she felt she was unjust.  But in her condition, the heart of a woman is instantly planted in jungle when the spirits of the two men closest to her are made to stand opposed by a sudden excitement of her fears for the beloved one.  She cannot see widely, and is one of the wild while the fit lasts; and, after it, that savage narrow vision she had of the unbeloved retains its vivid print in permanence.  Was she unjust?  Aminta cited corroboration of her being accurate:  such was Lord Ormont! and although his qualities of gallantry, courtesy, integrity, honourable gentleman, presented a fair low-level account on the other side, she had so stamped his massive selfishness and icy inaccessibility to emotion on her conception of him that the repulsive figure formed by it continued towering when her mood was kinder.

Love played on love in the woman’s breast.  Her love had taken a fever from her lord’s communication of the accident at Chiallo’s, and she pushed her alarm to imagine the deadliest, and plead for the right of confession to herself of her unrepented regrets.  She and Matey Weyburn had parted without any pressure of hands, without a touch.  They were, then, unplighted if now the grave divided them!  No touch:  mere glances!  And she sighed not, as she pleaded, for the touch, but for the plighting it would have been.  If now she had lost him, he could never tell herself that since the dear old buried and night-walking schooldays she had said once Matey to him, named him once to his face Matey Weyburn.  A sigh like the roll of a great wave breaking against a wall of rock came from her for the possibly lost chance of naming him to his face Matey,—­oh, and seeing his look as she said it!

The boldness might be fancied:  it could not be done.  Agreeing with the remote inner voice of her reason so far, she toned her exclamatory foolishness to question, in Reason’s plain, deep, basso-profundo accompaniment tone, how much the most blessed of mortal women could do to be of acceptable service to a young schoolmaster?