Age mouthed an ugly word to the veteran insensible of it in his body, when a desire to be one with these pairs of nimble wrists and legs was like an old gamecock shown the pit and put back into the basket.  He left the place, carrying away an image of the coxcombical attitudinizing of the man Morsfield at the salut, upon which he brought down his powers of burlesque.

My lord sketched the scene he had just quitted to a lady who had stopped her carriage.  She was the still beautiful Mrs. Amy May, wife of the famous fighting captain.  Her hair was radiant in a shady street; her eyelids tenderly toned round the almond enclosure of blue pebbles, bright as if shining from the seawash.  The lips of the fair woman could be seen to say that they were sweet when, laughing or discoursing, they gave sight of teeth proudly her own, rivalling the regularity of the grin of dentistry.  A Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art, and there was a decorous concealment of the contest and the anguish in the process, for which Lord Ormont liked her well enough to wink benevolently at her efforts to cheat the world at various issues, and maintain her duel with Time.  The world deserved that she should beat it, even if she had been all deception.

She let the subject of Mr. Morsfield pass without remark from her, until the exhaustion of open-air topics hinted an end of their conversation, and she said—­

’We shall learn next week what to think if the civilians.  I have heard Mr. Morsfield tell that he is ‘de premiere force.’  Be on your guard.  You are to know that I never forget a service, and you did me one once.’  ’You have reason . . . ?’ said the earl.

’If anybody is the dragon to the treasure he covets he is a spadassin who won’t hesitate at provocations.  Adieu.’

Lord Ormont’s eye had been on Mr. Morsfield.  He had seen what Mrs. Pagnell counselled her niece to let, him see.  He thanked Mr. Morsfield for a tonic that made him young with anticipations of bracing; and he set his head to work upon an advance half-way to meet the gentleman, and safely exclude his wife’s name.

Monday brought an account of Cuper’s boys.  Aminta received it while the earl was at his papers for the morning’s news of the weightier deeds of men.

They were the right boys, Weyburn said; his interview with Gowen, Bench, Parsons, and the others assured him that the school was breathing big lungs.  Mr. Cuper, too, had spoken well of them.

‘You walked the twenty miles?’ Aminta interrupted him.

’With my German friend:  out and home:  plenty of time in the day.  He has taken to English boys, but asks why enthusiasm and worship of great deeds don’t grow upward from them to their elders.  And I, in turn, ask why Germans insist on that point more even than the French do.’

’Germans are sentimental.  But the English boys he saw belonged to a school with traditions of enthusiasm sown by some one.  The school remembered?’