, Lady Ormont's share of them hung in the abstract for him. His
hopes were bent on an early escape to Switzerland and his life's work.

Lady Charlotte mounted to ride to the battle daily. She talked of her
brother Rowsley, and of 'Aminta,' and provoked an advocacy of the
Countess of Ormont, and trampled the pleas and defences to dust, much in
the same tone as on the first day; sometimes showing a peep of sweet
humaneness, like the ripe berry of a bramble, and at others rattling
thunder at the wretch of a woman audacious enough to pretend to a part in
her brother's title.

Not that she had veneration for titles. She considered them a tinsel, and
the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick. Adding: 'Of
course I stand for my class; and if we can't have a manlier people--and
it 's not likely in a country treating my brother so badly--well, then,
let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the
name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and
caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by 'a woman
springing up out of nothing'--a woman of no distinctive birth.

She was rational in her fashion; or Weyburn could at least see where and
how the reason in her took a twist. The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey would not
see it; he was, in charity to her ladyship, of a totally contrary
opinion, he informed Weyburn. The laborious pastor and much-enduring
Churchman met my lady's apologist as he was having a swing of the legs
down the lanes before breakfast, and he fell upon a series of complaints,
which were introduced by a declaration that 'he much feared' her ladyship
would have a heavy legal bill to pay for taking the law into her hands up
at Addicotes.

Her ladyship might, if she pleased, he said, encourage her domestics and
her husband's tenants and farm-labourers to abandon the church for the
chapel, and go, as she had done and threatened to do habitually, to the
chapel herself; but to denounce the ritual of the Orthodox Church under
the denomination of 'barbarous,' to say of the invoking supplications of
the service, that they were--she had been heard to state it more or less
publicly and repeatedly--suitable to abject ministers and throngs at the
court of an Indian rajah, that he did not hesitate to term highly
unbecoming in a lady of her station, subversive and unchristian. The
personal burdens inflicted on him by her ladyship he prayed for patience
to endur