‘The accident?’

Aminta tried to read in Mrs. Lawrence’s eyes whether it closely concerned her.

Those pretty eyes, their cut of lids hinting at delicate affinities with the rice-paper lady of the court of China, were trying to peer seriously.

‘Poor man!  One must be sorry for him:  he—­’

‘Who?’

’You ‘ve not heard, then?’ Mrs. Lawrence dropped her voice:  ‘Morsfield.’

Aminta shivered.  ’All I have heard-half a line from my lord this morning:  no name.  It was at the fencing-rooms, he said.’

‘Yes, he wouldn’t write more;’ said Mrs. Lawrence, nodding.  ’You know, he would have had to do it himself if it had not been done for him.  Adder saw him some days back in a brown consultation near his club with Captain May.  Oh, but of course it was accident!  Did he call it so in his letter to you?’

‘One word of Mr. Morsfield:  he is wounded?’

’Past cure:  he has the thing he cried for, spoilt boy as he was from his birth.  I tell you truth, m’ Aminta, I grieve to lose him.  What with his airs of the foreign-tinted, punctilious courtly gentleman covering a survival of the ancient British forest boar or bear, he was a picture in our modern set, and piquant.  And he was devoted to our sex, we must admit, after the style of the bears.  They are for honey, and they have a hug.  If he hadn’t been so much of a madman, I should have liked him for his courage.  He had plenty of that, nothing to steer it.  A second cousin comes in for his estates.’

‘He is dead?’ Aminta cried.

’Yes, dear, he is gone.  What the women think of it I can’t say.  The general feeling among the men is that some one of them would have had to send him sooner or later.  The curious point, Adder says, is his letting it be done by steel.  He was a dead shot, dangerous with the small sword, as your Mr. Weyburn said, only soon off his head.  But I used to be anxious about the earl’s meeting him with pistols.  He did his best to provoke it.  Here, Adder,’—­she spoke over her shoulder,—­’tell Lady Ormont all you know of the Morsfield-May affair.’

Lord Adderwood bowed compliance.  His coolness was the masculine of Mrs. Lawrence’s hardly feminine in treating of a terrible matter, so that the dull red facts had to be disengaged from his manner of speech before they sank into Aminta’s acceptance; of them as credible.

’They fought with foils, buttons off, preliminary ceremonies perfect; salute in due order; guard, and at it.

Odd thing was, nobody at Chiallo’s had a notion of the business till Morsfield was pinked.  He wouldn’t be denied; went to work like a fellow meaning to be skewered, if he couldn’t do the trick:  and he tried it.  May had been practising some weeks.  He’s well on the Continent by this time.  It’ll blow over.  Button off sheer accident.  I wasn’t lucky enough to see the encounter:  came in just when Chiallo was lashing his poll over Morsfield flat on the ground.