‘You are aware you are speaking of my wife, Charlotte?’

‘You daren’t say my sister-in-law.’

He did not choose to say it; and once more she dared him.  She could imagine she scored a point.

They were summoned to lunch by Mr. Eglett; and there was an hour’s armistice; following which the earl demanded the restitution of the jewels, and heard the singular question, childishly accentuated, ’What for?’

Patience was his weapon and support, so he named his object with an air of inveteracy in tranquillity they were for his wife to wear.

Lady Charlotte dared him to say they were for her sister-in-law.

He despised the transparent artifice of the challenge.

‘But you have to own the difference,’ she said.  ’You haven’t lost respect for your family, thank God!  No.  It ’s one thing to say she ’s a wife:  you hang fire when it ’s to say she ‘s my sister-in-law.’

‘You’ll have to admit the fact, Charlotte.’

‘How long is it since I should have had to admit the fact?’

‘From the date of my marriage.’

‘Tell me the date.’

’No, you don’t wear a wig, Charlotte; but you are fit to practise in the Law-courts!’ he said, exasperatedly jocular.

She had started a fresh diversion, and she pressed him for the date.  ’I ‘m supposed to have had a sister-in-law-how many weeks?—­months?’

‘Years.’

’Married years!  And if you’ve been married years, where were you married?  Not in a church.  That woman’s no church-bride.’

‘There are some clever women made idiots of by their trullish tempers.’

‘Abuse away.  I’ve asked you where you were married, Rowsley.’

‘Go to Madrid.  Go to the Embassy.  Apply to the chaplain.’

’Married in Madrid!  Who’s ever married in Madrid!  You flung her a yellow handkerchief, and she tied it round her neck—­that ’s your ceremony!  Now you tell me you’ve been married years; and she’s a young woman; you fetch her over from Madrid, set her in a place where those Morsfields and other fungi-fellows grow, and she has to think herself lucky to be received by a Lady Staines and a Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, and she the talk of the town, refused at Court, for all an honourable-enough old woman countenanced her in pity; and I ’m asked to believe she was my brother’s wife, sister-in-law of mine, all the while!  I won’t.’

Lady Charlotte dilated on it for a length of time, merely to show she declined to believe it; pouring Morsfield over him and the talk of the town, the gypsy caught in Spain—­now to be foisted on her as her sister-in-law!  She could fancy she produced an effect.

She did indeed unveil to him a portion of the sufferings his Aminta had undergone; as visibly, too, the good argumentative reasons for his previous avoidance of the deadly, dismal wrangle here forced on him.  A truly dismal, profitless wrangle!  But the finish of it would be the beginning of some solace to his Aminta.