Besides, Lady Ormont appeared, in the company of her friend Selina Collett, not worse than rather too thoughtful; not distinctly unhappy.  And she was conversable, smiling.  She might have had an explanation with my lord, accepting excuses—­or, who knows? taking the blame, and offering them.  Weakness is pliable.  So pliable is it, that it has been known for a crack of the masterly whip to fling off the victim and put on the culprit!  Ay, but let it be as it may with Lady Ormont, Aminta is of a different composition.  Aminta’s eyes of the return journey to London were haunting lights, and lured him to speculate; and for her sake he rejected the thought that for him they meant anything warmer than the passing thankfulness, though they were a novel assurance to him of her possession beneath her smothering cloud of the power to resolve, and show forth a brilliant individuality.

The departure of the ladies and my lord in the travelling carriage for the house on the Upper Thames was passably sweetened to Weyburn by the command to him to follow in a day or two, and continue his work there until he left England.  Aminta would not hear of an abandonment of the Memoirs.  She spoke on the subject to my lord as to a husband pardoned.

She was not less affable and pleasant with him out of Weyburn’s hearing.  My lord earned her gratitude for his behaviour to Selina Collett, to whom he talked interestedly of her favourite pursuit, as he had done on the day when, as he was not the man to forget, her arrival relieved him of anxiety.  Aminta, noticed the box on the seat beside him.

They drove up to their country house in time to dress leisurely for dinner.  Nevertheless, the dinner-hour had struck several minutes before she descended; and the earl, as if not expecting her, was out on the garden path beside the river bank with Selina.  She beckoned from the step of the open French window.

He came to her at little Selina’s shuffling pace, conversing upon water-plants.

‘No jewelry to-day?’ he said.

And Aminta replied:  ’Carstairs has shown me the box and given the key.  I have not opened it.’

‘Time in the evening, or to-morrow.  You guess the contents?’

‘I presume I do.’

She looked feverish and shadowed.

He murmured kindly:  ‘Anything?’

‘Not now:  we will dine.’

She had missed, had lost, she feared, her own jewelbox; a casket of no great treasure to others, but of a largely estimable importance to her.

After the heavy ceremonial entrance and exit of dishes, she begged the earl to accompany her for an examination of the contents of the box.

As soon as her chamber-door was shut, she said, in accents of alarm:  ’Mine has disappeared.  Carstairs, I know, is to be trusted.  She remembers carrying the box out of my room; she believes she can remember putting it into the fly.  She had to confess that it had vanished, without her knowing how, when my boxes were unpacked.’