No woman was in the field.  Lady Charlotte could have submitted to the intrusion of one of those at times wholesome victims, for the sake of the mollification the unhappy proud thing might bring to a hero smarting under injustice at the hands of chiefs and authorities.

He passed on to Steignton, returned to London, and left England for Spain, as he wrote word, saying he hoped to settle at Steignton neat year.  He was absent the next year, and longer.  Lady Charlotte had the surprising news that Steignton was let, shooting and all, for five years; and he had no appointment out of England or at home.  When he came to Olmer again he was under one of his fits of reserve, best undisturbed.  Her sympathy with a great soldier snubbed, an active man rusting, kept her from remonstrance.

Three years later she was made meditative by the discovery of a woman’s being absolutely in the field, mistress of the field; and having been there for a considerable period, dating from about the time when he turned his back on England to visit a comrade-in-arms condemned by the doctors to pass the winter in Malaga; and it was a young woman, a girl in her teens, a handsome girl.  Handsome was to be expected; Ormont bargained for beauty.  But report said the girl was very handsome, and showed breeding:  she seemed a foreigner, walked like a Goddess, sat her horse the perfect Amazon.  Rumour called her a Spaniard.

“Not if she rides!” Lady Charlotte cut that short.

Rumour had subsequently more to say.  The reporter in her ear did not confirm it, and she was resolutely deaf to a story incredible of her brother—­the man, of all men living, proudest of his name, blood, station.  So proud was he by nature, too, that he disdained to complain of rank injustice; he maintained a cheerful front against adversity and obloquy.  And this man of complete self-command, who has every form of noble pride, gets cajoled like a twenty-year-old yahoo at college!  Do you imagine it?  To suppose of a man cherishing the name of Ormont, that he would bestow it legally on a woman, a stranger, and imperil his race by mixing blood with a creature of unknown lineage, was—­why, of course, it was to suppose him struck mad, and there never had been madness among the Ormonts:  they were too careful of the purity of the strain.  Lady Charlotte talked.  She was excited, and ran her sentences to blanks, a cunning way for ministering consolation to her hearing, where the sentence intended a question, and the blank ending caught up the query tone and carried it dwindling away to the most distant of throttled interrogatives.  She had, in this manner, only to ask,—­her hearing received the comforting answer it desired; for she could take that thin far sound as a travelling laughter of incredulity, triumphant derision.

This meant to her—­though she scarcely knew it, though the most wilful of women declined to know it—­a state of alarm.  She had said of her brother in past days that he would have his time of danger after striking sixty.  The dangerous person was to be young.