n, and they say she aimed at her
enfranchisement by plotting the collision, for his Yorkshire revenues
are immense, and he is, you know, skilful in the use of arms, and
Captain May has no resources whatever: penury! no one cares to speculate
how they contrive!--but while that dreadful duelling--and my lord as bad
as any in his day-exists, depend upon it, an unscrupulous good-looking
woman has as many lives for her look of an eye or lift of a finger as a
throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.'

Aminta wished to dream. She gave her aunt a second dose, and the lady
relapsed again.

Power to dream had gone. She set herself to look at roadside things,
cottage gardens, old housewives in doorways, gaffer goodman meeting his
crony on the path, groups of boys and girls. She would take the girls,
Matthew Weyburn the boys. She had lessons to give to girls, she had
sympathy, pity, anticipation. That would be a life of happy service. It
might be a fruitful trial of the system he proposed, to keep the boys
and girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games.
His was the larger view. Her lord's view appeared similar to that of her
aunt's 'throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.' Matthew Weyburn believed in
the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief like it.

Presently Mrs. Pagnell returned to the charge, and once more she was
nipped, and irritated to declare she had never known her niece's temper
so provoking. Aminta was launching a dream of a lass she had seen in a
field, near a white hawthorn, standing upright, her left arm aloft round
the pole of a rake, the rim of her bonnet tipped on her forehead; an
attitude of a rustic.

Britannia with helmet heeling at dignity. The girl's eyes hung to the
passing chariot, without movement of her head. It was Aminta who looked
back, and she saw the girl looking away. Among the superior dames and
damsels she had seen, there was not one to match that figure for stately
air, gallant ease, and splendour of pose. Matthew Weyburn would have
admired the girl. Aminta did better than envy, she cast off the last
vestiges of her bitter ambition to be a fine lady, and winged into the
bosom of the girl, and not shyly said 'yes' to Matthew Weyburn, and
to herself, deep in herself: 'A maid has no need to be shy.' Hardly
blushing, she walks on into the new life beside him, and hears him
say: 'I in my way, you in yours; we are equals, the stronger for being
equals,' and she quite agrees