Temptation threw warm light on the memory, and very artfully, by conjuring up the faces, cries, characters, all the fun of the boys.  There was no possibility of forgetting her image in those days; he had, therefore, to live with it and to live near the grown woman—­Time’s present answer to the old riddle.  It seemed to him, that instead of sorting Lord Ormont’s papers, he ought to be at sharp exercise.  According to his prescript, sharp exercise of lungs and limbs is a man’s moral aid against temptation.  He knew it as the one trusty antidote for him, who was otherwise the vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny.  Certainly it is the best philosophy youth can pretend to practise; and Lord Ormont kept him from it!  Worse than that, the slips and sheets of paper in the dispatch-box were not an exercise of the mind even; there was nothing to grapple with—­no diversion; criticism passed by them indulgently, if not benevolently.

Quite apart from the subject inscribed on them, Weyburn had now and again a blow at the breast, of untraceable origin.  For he was well enough aware that the old days when Browny imagined him a hero, in drinking his praises of a brighter, were drowned.  They were dead; but here was she the bride of the proved hero.  His praises might have helped in causing her willingness—­devotional readiness, he could fancy—­to yield her hand.  Perhaps at the moment when the hero was penning some of the Indian slips here, the boy at school was preparing Aminta; but he could not be responsible for a sacrifice of the kind suggested by Lady Charlotte.  And no, there had been no such sacrifice, although Lord Ormont’s inexplicable treatment of his young countess, under cover of his notorious reputation with women, conduced to the suspicion.

While the vagrant in Weyburn was thus engaged, his criticism of the soldier-lord’s field-English on paper let the stuff go tolerantly unexamined, but with a degree of literary contempt at heart for the writer who had that woman-scented reputation and expressed himself so poorly.  The sentiment was outside of reason.  We do, nevertheless, expect our Don Juans to deliver their minds a trifle elegantly; if not in classic English, on paper; and when we find one of them inflicting cruelty, as it appears, and the victim is a young woman, a beautiful young woman, she pleads to us poetically against the bearish sentences of his composition.  We acknowledge, however, that a mere sentiment, entertained possibly by us alone, should not be permitted to condemn him unheard.

Lady Ormont was not seen again.  After luncheon at a solitary table, the secretary worked till winter’s lamps were lit; and then shone freedom, with assurance to him that he would escape from the miry mental ditch he had been floundering in since Aminta revealed herself.  Sunday was the glorious day to follow, with a cleansing bath of a walk along the southern hills; homely English scenery to show to a German friend, one of his “Company.”  Half a dozen good lads were pledged to the walk; bearing which in view, it could be felt that this nonsensical puzzlement over his relations to the moods and tenses of a married woman would be bounced out of recollection before nightfall.  The landscape given off any of the airy hills of Surrey would suffice to do it.