ast,
flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness on
sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask,
romance in its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what a background is the
present when we have the past to the fore! That filmy past is diaphanous
on heaving ribs.

She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip. "Don't speak of manaoeuvres,
dear aunt. And we'll leave Granada to the poets. I'm tired. Talk of our
own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please of
the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me. Do they go on marrying?"

"Why, my child, how could they go on without it?"

Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids. "Oh, me!" she sighed, feeling
the tear come with a sting from checked laughter. "But there are
marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen
officiated. Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell."

"You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?"

"Lady Charlotte Eglett? No syllable. Or wait--my lord's secretary was
with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose."

"There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make a man
like Lord Ormont afraid of her. And no doubt she is of our old
aristocracy. And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation--like a
man. Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation. Years back, I
am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an example.
Lawyers hear next to everything. I am told she lifted her horsewhip on a
gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him down. You will
say, the sister of your husband. No; not to make my niece a countess,
would I, if I had known the kind of family! Then one asks, Is she half as
much afraid of him? In that case, no wonder they have given up meeting.
Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties. Well, Lady Eglett, and Aminta,
Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as they call it, let her
only have her dues. My dear, I would--if I ever did--swear the woman is
jealous."

"Of me, aunty!"

"I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if
somebody had his twitch of jealousy. Wives may be too meek. Cases and
cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought to
his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most
innocent of wives. A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are
poisons that cure. It might come into the courts; and the