Weyburn smiled.  He set a short look at Aminta; and she, conscious of her detected diplomacy, had an inward shiver, mixed of the fascination and repugnance felt by a woman who knows that under one man’s eyes her character is naked and anatomized.  Her character?—­her soul.  He held it in hand and probed it mercifully.  She had felt the sweet sting again and again, and had shrunk from him, and had crawled to him.  The love of him made it all fascination.  How did he learn to read at any moment right to the soul of a woman?  Did experience teach him, or sentimental sympathy?  He was too young, he was too manly.  It must be because of his being in heart and mind the brother to the sister with women.

Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes.  Bee-note and woodside blackbird and meadow cow, and the fish of the silver rolling rings, composed the leap of the music.

She gave her mind to his voice, following whither it went; half was in air, higher than the swallow’s, exalting him.

How is it he is the brother of women?  They are sisters for him because he is neither sentimentalist nor devourer.  He will not flatter to feed on them.  The one he chooses, she will know love.  There are women who go through life not knowing love.  They are inanimate automatic machines, who lay them down at last, inquiring wherefore they were caused to move.  She is not of that sad flock.  She will be mated; she will have the right to call him Matey.  A certain Browny called him Matey.  She lived and died.  A certain woman apes Browny’s features and inherits her passion, but has forfeited her rights.  Were she, under happiest conditions, to put her hand in his, shame would burn her.  For he is just—­he is Justice; and a woman bringing him less than his due, she must be a creature of the slime!

This was the shadowy sentiment that made the wall of division between them.  There was no other.  Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union.  He was unjust—­he was Injustice.  The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to Injustice.  And if we have the world for the buttress of injustice, then is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible.  Laws are necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage’s old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice.  There cannot be a based society upon such conditions.  An immolation of the naturally constituted individual arrests the general expansion to which we step, decivilizes more, and is more impious to the God in man, than temporary revelries of a licence that Nature soon checks.

Arrows of thoughts resembling these shot over the half of Aminta’s mind not listening.  Her lover’s head was active on the same theme while he spoke.  They converged to it from looks crossing or catching profiles, or from tones, from a motion of hand, from a chance word.  Insomuch that the third person present was kept unobservant only by her studious and humble speculations on the young schoolmaster’s grand project to bring the nationalities together, and teach Old England to the Continent—­the Continent to Old England:  our healthy games, our scorn of the lie, manliness; their intellectual valour, diligence, considerate manners.