ote for him, who
was otherwise the vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny. Certainly it
is the best philosophy youth can pretend to practise; and Lord Ormont
kept him from it! Worse than that, the slips and sheets of paper in the
dispatch-box were not an exercise of the mind even; there was nothing to
grapple with--no diversion; criticism passed by them indulgently, if not
benevolently.

Quite apart from the subject inscribed on them, Weyburn had now and again
a blow at the breast, of untraceable origin. For he was well enough aware
that the old days when Browny imagined him a hero, in drinking his
praises of a brighter, were drowned. They were dead; but here was she the
bride of the proved hero. His praises might have helped in causing her
willingness--devotional readiness, he could fancy--to yield her hand.
Perhaps at the moment when the hero was penning some of the Indian slips
here, the boy at school was preparing Aminta; but he could not be
responsible for a sacrifice of the kind suggested by Lady Charlotte. And
no, there had been no such sacrifice, although Lord Ormont's inexplicable
treatment of his young countess, under cover of his notorious reputation
with women, conduced to the suspicion.

While the vagrant in Weyburn was thus engaged, his criticism of the
soldier-lord's field-English on paper let the stuff go tolerantly
unexamined, but with a degree of literary contempt at heart for the
writer who had that woman-scented reputation and expressed himself so
poorly. The sentiment was outside of reason. We do, nevertheless, expect
our Don Juans to deliver their minds a trifle elegantly; if not in
classic English, on paper; and when we find one of them inflicting
cruelty, as it appears, and the victim is a young woman, a beautiful
young woman, she pleads to us poetically against the bearish sentences of
his composition. We acknowledge, however, that a mere sentiment,
entertained possibly by us alone, should not be permitted to condemn him
unheard.

Lady Ormont was not seen again. After luncheon at a solitary table, the
secretary worked till winter's lamps were lit; and then shone freedom,
with assurance to him that he would escape from the miry mental ditch he
had been floundering in since Aminta revealed herself. Sunday was the
glorious day to follow, with a cleansing bath of a walk along the
southern hills; homely English scenery to show to a German friend, one of
his "Company." Half a dozen good lads wer