command to the troopers to “give point,” and English officers’ neglect of sword exercise, and the “devil of a day” Old England is to have on a day to come.  My lord connected our day of trial with India.  Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying exalted minds.  Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.

The secretary behaved with a pretty civility.  Aminta shook herself to think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal’s example and train elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont’s eye.

Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised of being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense of the excellent motive which impelled them.  Even to the Countess of Ormont, she could have replied, “We might have given them a higher idea of us”—­if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta.  She hinted as much subsequently, and Aminta’s consciousness of the troth was touched.  The young schoolmaster’s company sat on her spirits, deadened her vocabulary.  Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the two gentlemen loudly laughing.  It seemed subserviency on the fallen young hero’s part.  His tastes were low.  He frequented the haunts of boxing men; her lord informed her of his having made, or of his making, matches to run or swim or walk certain distances against competitors or within a given time.  He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom he raced out of town on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to form.

But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where was a blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown’s cap on the head whose golden helm was fired by Pallas?

Nay, and let him look the hero still:  all the more does he point finger on his meanness of nature.

Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if she consents to an exchange of letters—­shameful indeed, but not such a feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an object of admiration degraded.  Bad she may be; and she may be deceived, vilely treated, in either case.  And what is a woman’s pride but the staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts?  He who wounds it cannot be forgiven—­never!—­he has killed the best of her.  Aminta found herself sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a girl’s worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman’s possible reckless fit of giddiness.  And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct it.  Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent about her:  they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the discovered meanness of the girl’s idol.  Her wicked memory was caused by his having plunged her low.