blushing, she walks on into the new life beside him, and hears him say:  ’I in my way, you in yours; we are equals, the stronger for being equals,’ and she quite agrees, and she gives him the fuller heart for his not requiring her to be absorbed—­she is the braver mate for him.  Does not that read his meaning?  Happiest of the girls of earth, she has divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered, that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the animal crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by consent of human society the Upper.

Reason whispered a reminder of facts to her.

‘But I am not the Countess of Ormont!’ she said.  She felt herself the girl, her sensations were so intensely simple.

Proceeding to an argument, that the earl did not regard her as the Countess of Ormont, or the ceremony at the British Embassy as one serious and binding, she pushed her reason too far:  sweet delusion waned.  She waited for some fresh scene to revive it.

Aminta sat unwittingly weaving her destiny.

While she was thus engaged, a carriage was rolling on the more westerly road down to Steignton.  Seated in it were Lady Charlotte Eglett and Matthew Weyburn.  They had met at Arthur Abner’s office the previous day.  She went there straight from Lord Ormont’s house-agent and upholsterer, to have a queer bit of thunderous news confirmed, that her brother was down at Steignton, refurnishing the house, and not for letting.  She was excited:  she treated Arthur Abner’s closed-volume reticence as a corroboration of the house-agent’s report, and hearing Weyburn speak of his anxiety to see the earl immediately, in order to get release from his duties, proposed a seat in her carriage; for down Steignton way she meant to go, if only as excuse for a view of the old place.  She kept asking what Lord Ormont wanted down at Steignton refurnishing the house, and not to let it!  Her evasions of answers that, plain speculation would supply were quaint.  ’He hasn’t my feeling for Steignton.  He could let it—­I couldn’t.  Sacrilege to me to have a tenant in my old home where I was born.  He’s furnishing to raise his rent.  His country won’t give him anything to do, so he turns miser.  That’s my brother Rowsley’s way of taking on old age.’

Her brother Rowsley might also be showing another sign of his calamitous condition.  She said to Weyburn, in the carriage, that her brother Rowsley might like having his hair clipped by the Philistine woman; which is one of the ways of strong men to confess themselves ageing.  ‘Not,’ said she, with her usual keen justness ’not that I’ve, a word against Delilah.  I look upon her as a patriot; she dallied and she used the scissors on behalf of her people.  She wasn’t bound to Samson in honour,—­liked a strong man, probably enough.  She proved she liked her country better.  The Jews wrote the story of it, so there she stands for posterity to pelt her, poor wretch.’