’Do me the honour to call and see me to-morrow, after breakfast, before her ladyship starts for the fray on Addicote heights,’ Weyburn said; ’and I will ask your permission to stand by you.  Her bark is terrific, we know; and she can bite, but there’s no venom.’

Finally, on a heave of his chest, Mr. Hampton-Evey consented to call, in the interests of peace.

Weyburn had said it must be ’man to man with her, facing her and taking steps’; and, although the prospect was unpleasant to repulsiveness, it was a cheerful alternative beside Mr. Hampton-Evey’s experiences and anticipations of the malignant black power her ladyship could be when she was not faced.

‘Let the man come,’ said Lady Charlotte.  Her shoulders intimated readiness for him.

She told Weyburn he might be present—­insisted to have him present.  During the day Weyburn managed to slide in observations on the favourable reports of Mr. Hampton-Evey’s work among the poor—­emollient doses that irritated her to fret and paw, as at a checking of her onset.

In the afternoon the last disputed tree on the Addicotes’ ridge was felled and laid on Olmer ground.  Riding with Weyburn and the joyful Leo, she encountered Mr. Eglett and called out the news.  He remarked, in the tone of philosophy proper to a placable country gentleman obedient to government on foreign affairs:  ’Now for the next act.  But no more horseback now, mind!’

She muttered of not recollecting a promise.  He repeated the interdict.  Weyburn could fancy seeing her lips form words of how she hated old age.

He had been four days at Olmer, always facing her, ‘man to man,’ in the matter of Lady Ormont, not making way at all, but holding firm, and winning respectful treatment.  They sat alone in her private room, where, without prelude, she discharged a fiery squib at impudent hussies caught up to the saddle-bow of a hero for just a canter, and pretending to a permanent seat beside him.

’You have only to see Lady Ormont; you will admit the justice of her claim, my lady,’ said he; and as evidently he wanted a fight, she let him have it.

’You try to provoke me; you take liberties.  You may call the woman Aminta, I’ve told you; you insult me when you call the woman by my family name.’

‘Pardon me, my lady:  I have no right to call Lady Ormont Aminta.’

‘You’ve never done so, eh?  Say!’

She had him at the edge of the precipice.  He escaped by saying, ’Her Christian name was asked the other day, and I mentioned it.  She is addressed by me as Lady Ormont.’

’And by her groom and her footman.  They all do; it ’s the indemnity to that class of young woman.  Her linendraper is Lady-Ormonting as you do.  I took you for a gentleman.  Let me hear you give her that title again, you shall hear her true one, that the world fits her with, from me.’

The time was near the half-hour bell before dinner, the situation between them that of the fall of the breath to fetch words electrical.  She left it to him to begin the fight, and was not sorry that she had pricked him for it.