Otherwise there was no interpreting his lordship.  To think of herself as personally disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. Pagnell, from her just expectation of reciprocal dealings in high society; for she confessed herself a fly to a title.  Where is the shame, if titles are created to attract?  Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may anticipate hard bargains; the widow of a solicitor had not to learn it.  But when a distinguished member and ornament of the chosen seats above blew cold upon their gesticulatory devotee, and was besides ungrateful; she was more than commonly assured of his being, as she called him, “a sphinx.”  His behaviour to his legally wedded wife confirmed the charge.

She checked her flow to resume the question.  “So, then, where are we now?  He allows you liberally for pin-money in addition to your own small independent income.  Satisfaction with that would warrant him to suppose his whole duty done by you.”

“We are where we were, aunty; the month has made no change,” said Aminta in languor.

“And you as patient as ever?”

“I am supposed to have everything a woman can require.”

“Can he possibly think it?  And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont allows you to call your friends.  I have been hearing—­it is not mere airy tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law.  Tighten your lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs. Lawrence Finchley.  I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all.  Oh, I know my niece Aminta, when it’s a friend to stand by; but our position—­thanks to your inscrutable lord and master—­demands of us the utmost scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying about, and those lawyers picking up and putting together.  I have had a difficulty to persuade them!... and my own niece! whom I saw married at the British Embassy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody; for it was my doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English Protestant clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of any of these excellent new Life Assurance offices they are starting for the benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the ceremony—­if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign places.  My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, ’All has gone well up to now.’  I remember murmuring the words.  Then your letter, received in that smelly Barcelona:  Lord Ormont was carrying you off to Granada—­a dream of my infancy!  It may not have been his manoeuvre, but it was the beginning of his manoeuvres.”

Aminta shuddered.  “And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!” She flung out the rattle, yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman wounded.  One of her aunt’s chance shots had traversed her breast, flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness on sword-edges of shade,—­and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask, romance in its anatomy, cold English mist.  Ah, what a background is the present when we have the past to the fore!  That filmy past is diaphanous on heaving ribs.