Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity’s offspring.  Thunderclouds have as little love of the lightnings they fling.

Aminta was aware only of her torment.  The trees were bending, the water hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious people in surges of wreck.  She scorned the meaningless shake of the garments of earth, and exclaimed:  ‘If we were by the sea to-night!’

‘I shall be to-morrow night,’ said Selina.  ’I shall think of you.  Oh! would you come with me?’

‘Would you have me?’

‘My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.’

‘Write to her before the post is out.’

‘We shall travel down together?’

Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying, that down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta.  She was bidden to haste.

CHAPTER XXVI

VISITS OF FAREWELL

The noise in London over Adolphus Morsfield’s tragical end disturbed Lord Ormont much less than the cessation of letters from his Aminta; and that likewise, considering his present business on her behalf, he patiently shrugged at and pardoned, foreseeing her penitent air.  He could do it lightly after going some way to pardon his offending country.  For Aminta had not offended, his robust observation of her was moved to the kindly humorous by a reflective view here and there of the downright woman her clever little shuffles exposed her to be, not worse.  It was her sex that made her one of the gliders in grasses, some of whom are venomous; but she belonged to the order only as an innocuous blindworm.  He could pronounce her small by-play with Morsfield innocent, her efforts to climb the stairs into Society quite innocent; judging her, of course, by her title of woman.  A woman’s innocence has a rainbow skin.  Set this one beside other women, she comes out well, fairly well, well enough.

Now that the engagement with Charlotte assumed proportions of a series of battle, properly to be entitled a campaign, he had, in his loneliness, fallen into the habit of reflecting at the close of his day’s work; and the rubbing of that unused opaque mirror hanging inside a man of action had helped him piecemeal to perceive bits of his conduct, entirely approved by him, which were intimately connected, nevertheless, with a train of circumstances that he disliked and could not charge justly upon any other shoulders than his own.  What was to be thought of it?  He would not be undergoing this botheration of the prolonged attempt to bring a stubborn woman to a sense of her duty, if he had declared his marriage in the ordinary style, and given his young countess her legitimate place before the world.  What impeded it?  The shameful ingratitude of his countrymen to the soldier who did it eminent service at a crisis of the destinies of