Her head burned.  All the barren interrogations were up, running and knocking for hollow responses; and, saving a paleness of face, she cloaked any small show of the riot.  She was an amiable hostess.  She had ceased to comprehend Mrs. Lawrence, even to the degree of thinking her unfeminine.  She should have known that the ‘angelical chimpanzee,’ as a friend, once told of his being a favourite with the lady, had called her, could not simulate a feeling, and had not the slightest power of pretence to compassion for an ill-fated person who failed to quicken her enthusiasm.  In that, too, she was a downright boy.  Morsfield was a kind of Bedlamite to her; amusing in his antics, and requiring to be manoeuvred and eluded while he lived:  once dead, just a tombstone, of interest only to his family.

She beckoned Aminta to follow her; and, with a smirk of indulgent fun, commended Lord Adderwood to a study of Selina Collett’s botany-folios, which the urbanest of indifferent gentlemen had slid his eyes over his nose to inspect before the lunch.

’You ought to know what is going on in town, my dear Aminta.  You have won the earl to a sense of his duty, and he ’s at work on the harder task of winning Lady Charlotte Eglett to a sense of hers.  It ’s tremendous.  Has been forward some days, and no sign of yielding on either side.  Mr. Eglett, good man, is between them, catching it right and left; and he deserves his luck for marrying her.  Vows she makes him the best of wives.  If he ’s content, I ’ve nothing to complain of.  You must be ready to receive her; my lord is sure to carry the day.  You gulp.  You won’t be seeing much of her.  I ’m glad to say he is condescending to terms of peace with the Horse Guards.  We hear so.  You may be throning it officially somewhere next year.  And all ’s well that ends well!  Say that to me!’

‘It is, when the end comes,’ Aminta replied.

Mrs. Lawrence’s cool lips were pressed to her cheek.  The couple and their waterman rowed away to the party they had left with the four-in-hand at their inn.

A wind was rising.  The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades dipped and streamed.

Surcharged with unassimilated news of events, that made a thunder in her head, Aminta walked down the garden path, meeting Selina and bearing her on.  She had a witch’s will to rouse gales.  Hers was not the woman’s nature to be driven cowering by stories of men’s bloody deeds.  She took the field, revolted, dissevering herself from the class which tolerated them—­actuated by a reflective moralty, she believed; and loathed herself for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class.  But it was not the class, it was against her lord as representative of the class, that she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging him.  Her enveloping mind was black on him.  Such as one of those hard slaughtering men could call her his own?  She breathed short and breathed deep.  Her bitter reason had but the common pity for a madman despatched to his rest.  Yet she knew hatred of her lord in his being suspected as instigator or accomplice of the hand that dealt the blow.  He became to her thought a python whose coils were about her person, insufferable to the gaze backward.