‘It may be better,’ said Aminta, and thought as she spoke.

’Slow work, if we have a taste for the work, doesn’t dispirit.  Otherwise, one may say that an African or South American traveller has a more exciting time.  I shall manage to keep my head on its travels.’

‘You have ideas about the education of girls?’

‘They can’t be carried out unaided.’

‘Aid will come.’

Weyburn’s confidence, high though it was, had not mounted to that pitch.

‘One may find a mate,’ he said.  The woman to share and practically to aid in developing such ideas is not easily found:  that he left as implied.

Aminta was in need of poetry; but the young schoolmaster’s plain, well-directed prose of the view of a business in life was welcome to her.

Lord Ormont entered the room.  She reminded him of the boys of High Brent and the heroine Jane.  He was ready to subscribe his five-and-twenty guineas, he said.  The amount of the sum gratified Weyburn, she could see.  She was proud of her lord, and of the boys and the little girl; and she would have been happy to make the ardent young schoolmaster aware of her growing interest in the young.

The night before the earl’s departure on the solitary expedition to which she condemned him, he surprised her with a visit of farewell, so that he need not disturb her in the early morning, he said.  She was reading beside her open jewel-box, and she closed it with the delicate touch of a hand turned backward while listening to him, with no sign of nervousness.

CHAPTER XIII

WAR AT OLMER

Lively doings were on the leap to animate Weyburn at Olmer during Easter week.  The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, rector of Barborough, on hearing that Lady Charlotte Eglett was engaged in knocking at the doors of litigation with certain acts that constituted distinct breaches of the law and the peace, and were a violation of the rights of her neighbour, Mr. Gilbert Addicote, might hope that the troublesome parishioner whom he did not often number among his congregation would grant him a term of repose.  Therein he was deceived.  Alterations and enlargements of the church, much required, had necessitated the bricking up of a door regarded by the lady as the private entrance to the Olmer pew.  She sent him notice of her intention to batter at the new brickwork; so there was the prospect of a pew-fight before him.  But now she came to sit under him every Sunday; and he could have wished her absent; for she diverted his thoughts from piety to the selections of texts applicable in the case of a woman who sat with arms knotted, and the frown of an intemperate schoolgirl forbidden speech; while her pew’s firelight startlingly at intervals danced her sinister person into view, as from below.  The lady’s inaccessible and unconquerable obtuseness to exhortation informed the picture with an evil spirit that cried for wrestlings.