self
for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class. But it was not
the class, it was against her lord as representative of the class, that
she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging him. Her enveloping
mind was black on him. Such as one of those hard slaughtering men could
call her his own? She breathed short and breathed deep. Her bitter reason
had but the common pity for a madman despatched to his rest. Yet she knew
hatred of her lord in his being suspected as instigator or accomplice of
the hand that dealt the blow. He became to her thought a python whose
coils were about her person, insufferable to the gaze backward.

Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly
conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity's offspring. Thunderclouds have
as little love of the lightnings they fling.

Aminta was aware only of her torment. The trees were bending, the water
hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious
people in surges of wreck. She scorned the meaningless shake of the
garments of earth, and exclaimed: 'If we were by the sea to-night!'

'I shall be to-morrow night,' said Selina. 'I shall think of you. Oh!
would you come with me?'

'Would you have me?'

'My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.'

'Write to her before the post is out.'

'We shall travel down together?'

Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying, that
down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta. She was bidden
to haste.

CHAPTER XXVI

VISITS OF FAREWELL

The noise in London over Adolphus Morsfield's tragical end disturbed Lord
Ormont much less than the cessation of letters from his Aminta; and that
likewise, considering his present business on her behalf, he patiently
shrugged at and pardoned, foreseeing her penitent air. He could do it
lightly after going some way to pardon his offending country. For Aminta
had not offended, his robust observation of her was moved to the kindly
humorous by a reflective view here and there of the downright woman her
clever little shuffles exposed her to be, not worse. It was her sex that
made her one of the gliders in grasses, some of whom are venomous; but
she belonged to the order only as an innocuous blindworm. He could
pronounce her small by-play with Morsfield innocent, her efforts to climb
the stairs into Society quite innocent; judging her, of course, by her
title of woman.