Her aunt was astounded.

‘I did tell him we should be there, my dear.’  ’He appears to have a pleasure in meeting you.’  ‘He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.’

‘You correspond with him?’

‘I may not be the only one.’

‘Foolish aunty!  How can you speak to me in that senseless way?’ cried Aminta.  ’You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.’

’My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know I shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces.  It is their way of letting one feel they are of birth above us.  Mr. Morsfield—­purer blood than many of their highest titles—­is always polite, always deferential; he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the sphere I prefer.  We shall be travelling alone?’

‘Have you any fear?’

‘Not if nothing happens.  Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?’

‘He has much work to do.  He will not long be here.  He is absent to-day.’

Mrs. Pagnell remarked:  ‘I must say he earns his money easily.’

Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his time with them.  Her aunt’s coarse hint, and the thought of his loss, and the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked a sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her eyes from sight.  She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.  Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of tears.

CHAPTER XVI

ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON

Unaccountable resolutions, if impromptu and springing from the female breast, are popularly taken for caprices; and even when they divert the current of a history, and all the more when they are very small matters producing a memorable crisis.  In this way does a lazy world consign discussion to silence with the cynical closure.  Man’s hoary shrug at a whimsy sex is the reading of his enigma still.

But ask if she has the ordinary pumping heart in that riddle of a breast:  and then, as the organ cannot avoid pursuit, we may get hold of it, and succeed in spelling out that she is consequent, in her fashion.  She is a creature of the apparent moods and shifts and tempers only because she is kept in narrow confines, resembling, if you like, a wild cat caged.  Aminta’s journey down to Steignton turned the course of other fortunes besides her own; and she disdained the minor adventure it was, while dreaming it important; and she determined eagerly on going, without wanting to go; and it was neither from a sense of duty nor in a spirit of contrariety that she went.  Nevertheless, with her heart in hand, her movements are traceably as rational as a soldier’s before the enemy or a trader’s matching his customer.