Memory had of late been paying visits to a droopy plant in the golden summer drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and had taken her on board to refresh her with voyages, always bearing down full sail on a couple of blissful schools, abodes of bloom and briny vigour, sweet merriment, innocent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams the mightiest.  At night before sleep, at morn before rising, often during day, and when vexed or when dispirited, she had issued her command for the voyage.  Sheer refreshment followed, as is ever the case if our vessel carries no freight of hopes.  There could be no hopes.  It was forgotten that they had ever been seriously alive.  But it carried an admiration.  Now, an admiration may endure, and this one had been justified all round.  The figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta’s past.  The past of a bitterly humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it.  There he stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.

She could have no further voyages.  Ridicule convulsed her home of refuge.  For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was one thing; but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for the thirst of glory, accused his nature.  He so certainly involved her in the burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.

She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably languid—­a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr. Morsfield’s letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct pushed her to read his letter through.  She had not yet done that with attention.

Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her he loves her, and is heard with attention.  Aware that the sentences were poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the madness.  Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to read? or rather, to brood upon what she read.  The brooding ensued, was the thirst of her malady.  The best antidote she could hit on was the writer’s face.  Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage—­gifts she respected in him, found wanting in herself.  Read by Lord Ormont, this letter would mean a deadly thing.

Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not have him to peruse it.  If he manoeuvred, it was never basely.  Despite resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to her honour or his own in relation to it.  He would vindicate both at a stroke, for a sign.  Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly.  She charged on him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings, veilings, evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips, or a skirmisher word or a fan’s flourish, and which, intended to pique the husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley to murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation of Mr. Morsfield, “Dangerous man to play little games with!” It had brought upon her this letter of declaration, proposal, entreaty.