have submitted to the
intrusion of one of those at times wholesome victims, for the sake of the
mollification the unhappy proud thing might bring to a hero smarting
under injustice at the hands of chiefs and authorities.

He passed on to Steignton, returned to London, and left England for
Spain, as he wrote word, saying he hoped to settle at Steignton neat
year. He was absent the next year, and longer. Lady Charlotte had the
surprising news that Steignton was let, shooting and all, for five years;
and he had no appointment out of England or at home. When he came to
Olmer again he was under one of his fits of reserve, best undisturbed.
Her sympathy with a great soldier snubbed, an active man rusting, kept
her from remonstrance.

Three years later she was made meditative by the discovery of a woman's
being absolutely in the field, mistress of the field; and having been
there for a considerable period, dating from about the time when he
turned his back on England to visit a comrade-in-arms condemned by the
doctors to pass the winter in Malaga; and it was a young woman, a girl in
her teens, a handsome girl. Handsome was to be expected; Ormont bargained
for beauty. But report said the girl was very handsome, and showed
breeding: she seemed a foreigner, walked like a Goddess, sat her horse
the perfect Amazon. Rumour called her a Spaniard.

"Not if she rides!" Lady Charlotte cut that short.

Rumour had subsequently more to say. The reporter in her ear did not
confirm it, and she was resolutely deaf to a story incredible of her
brother--the man, of all men living, proudest of his name, blood,
station. So proud was he by nature, too, that he disdained to complain of
rank injustice; he maintained a cheerful front against adversity and
obloquy. And this man of complete self-command, who has every form of
noble pride, gets cajoled like a twenty-year-old yahoo at college! Do you
imagine it? To suppose of a man cherishing the name of Ormont, that he
would bestow it legally on a woman, a stranger, and imperil his race by
mixing blood with a creature of unknown lineage, was--why, of course, it
was to suppose him struck mad, and there never had been madness among the
Ormonts: they were too careful of the purity of the strain. Lady
Charlotte talked. She was excited, and ran her sentences to blanks, a
cunning way for ministering consolation to her hearing, where the
sentence intended a question, and the blank ending caught up the query