He had it up to the hilt.  We put a buttoned foil by the side of Morsfield, and all swore to secrecy.  As it is, it ’ll go badly against poor Chiallo.  Taste for fencing won’t be much improved by the affair.  They quarrelled in the dressing room, and fetched the foils and knocked off the buttons there.  A big rascal toady squire of Morsfield’s did it for him.  Morsfield was just up from Yorkshire.  He said he was expecting a summons elsewhere, bound to await it, declined provocation for the present.  May filliped him on the cheek.’

’Adder conveyed the information of her husband’s flight to the consolable Amy,’ said Mrs. Lawrence.

‘He had to catch the coach for Dover,’ Adderwood explained.  ’His wife was at a dinner-party.  I saw her at midnight.’

‘Fair Amy was not so very greatly surprised?’

‘Quite the soldier’s wife!’

’She said she was used to these little catastrophes.  But, Adder, what did she say of her husband?’

‘Said she was never anxious about him, for nothing would kill him.’

Mrs. Lawrence shook a doleful head at Aminta.

’You see, my dear Aminta, here’s another, and probably her last, chance of sharing the marquisate gone.  Who can fail to pity her, except old Time!  And I ’m sure she likes her husband well enough.  She ought:  no woman ever had such a servant.  But the captain has not been known to fight without her sanction, and the inference is—­’Alas! woe!  Fair Amy is doomed to be the fighting captain’s bride to the end of the chapter.  Adder says she looked handsome.  A dinner-party suits her cosmetic complexion better than a ball.  The account of the inquest is in the day’s papers, and we were tolerably rejoiced we could drive out of London without having to reply to coroner’s questions.’

‘He died-soon?’ Aminta’s voice was shaken.

Mrs. Lawrence touched at her breast, it might be for heart or lungs.  Judging by Aminta’s voice and face, one could suppose she was harking back, in woman’s way, to her original sentiment for the man, now that he lay prostrate.

Aminta read the unreproachful irony in the smile addressed to her.  She was too convulsed by her many emotions and shouting thoughts to think of defending herself.

Selina, in the drawing-room, diligently fingered and classed brown-black pressed weeds of her neophyte’s botany-folios.  The sight of her and her occupation struck Aminta as that of a person in another world beyond this world of blood, strangely substantial to view; and one heard her speak.

Guilty?—­no.  But she had wished to pique her lord.  After the term of a length of months, could it be that the unhappy man and she were punished for the half-minute’s acting of some interest in him?  And Lord Ormont had been seen consulting Captain May; or was it giving him directions?