She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip.  “Don’t speak of manaoeuvres, dear aunt.  And we’ll leave Granada to the poets.  I’m tired.  Talk of our own people, on your side and my father’s, and as much as you please of the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me.  Do they go on marrying?”

“Why, my child, how could they go on without it?”

Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids.  “Oh, me!” she sighed, feeling the tear come with a sting from checked laughter.  “But there are marriages, aunty, that don’t go on, though Protestant clergymen officiated.  Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell.”

“You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?”

“Lady Charlotte Eglett?  No syllable.  Or wait—­my lord’s secretary was with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose.”

“There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make a man like Lord Ormont afraid of her.  And no doubt she is of our old aristocracy.  And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation—­like a man.  Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation.  Years back, I am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an example.  Lawyers hear next to everything.  I am told she lifted her horsewhip on a gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him down.  You will say, the sister of your husband.  No; not to make my niece a countess, would I, if I had known the kind of family!  Then one asks, Is she half as much afraid of him?  In that case, no wonder they have given up meeting.  Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties.  Well, Lady Eglett, and Aminta, Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as they call it, let her only have her dues.  My dear, I would—­if I ever did—­swear the woman is jealous.”

“Of me, aunty!”

“I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if somebody had his twitch of jealousy.  Wives may be too meek.  Cases and cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought to his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most innocent of wives.  A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are poisons that cure.  It might come into the courts; and the nearer the proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a reconciliation.  Short of guilt, of course.  Men are so strange.  Imagine now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age.  Oh, I’ve no patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme!  Only there are men who won’t be set right unless we do.  My husband used to say, change is such a capital thing in life’s jogtrot; that men find it refreshing if we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding for them.  A spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all.  Anything rather.  Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley’s house as usual?”

Aminta’s cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion of the name.  “I meet him there.”