feel they belong to
God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they will set the
one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other, urging them
unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and his laws
altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who shines in
thought. It is a manner whereby the desperately harried among these
creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an agreeable,
almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.

There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
sensible to the pulses of his audience. Justice compels at times. In
truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown
of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.

Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him. Her will
could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her to
pique the mailed veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of an art had
been exhausted. Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually slave. A
luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly enfranchised
set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood; Sir
John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May, notorious wife of a
fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and other ladies, other
gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not yet paired: gossip
raged. Aminta was of a disposition too generously cordial to let her be
the rigorous critic of people with whom she was in touch. But her mind
knew relief when she recollected that her humble little school-mate,
Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in old days, was coming up
to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a week. However much a slave
and an unloved woman, she could be a constant and protecting friend.
Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little Selina. She thought of his
remarks about the modest-minded girl after first seeing her. From that
she struck upon a notion of reserves of humaneness being in him, if