n justified all round. The
figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta's past. The
past of a bitterly humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of
sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it. There he
stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.

She could have no further voyages. Ridicule convulsed her home of refuge.
For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was one thing;
but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for the thirst
of glory, accused his nature. He so certainly involved her in the
burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.

She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably
languid--a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr.
Morsfield's letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct pushed
her to read his letter through. She had not yet done that with attention.

Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her
he loves her, and is heard with attention. Aware that the sentences were
poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step
proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the
madness. Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to
read? or rather, to brood upon what she read. The brooding ensued, was
the thirst of her malady. The best antidote she could hit on was the
writer's face. Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage--gifts she
respected in him, found wanting in herself. Read by Lord Ormont, this
letter would mean a deadly thing.

Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name
bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not
have him to peruse it. If he manoeuvred, it was never basely. Despite
resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to her
honour or his own in relation to it. He would vindicate both at a stroke,
for a sign. Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly. She charged on
him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings, veilings,
evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips, or a
skirmisher word or a fan's flourish, and which, intended to pique the
husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley to
murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation of
Mr. Morsfield, "Dangerous man to play little games with!" It had bro