welcome to her.

Lord Ormont entered the room. She reminded him of the boys of High Brent
and the heroine Jane. He was ready to subscribe his five-and-twenty
guineas, he said. The amount of the sum gratified Weyburn, she could see.
She was proud of her lord, and of the boys and the little girl; and she
would have been happy to make the ardent young schoolmaster aware of her
growing interest in the young.

The night before the earl's departure on the solitary expedition to which
she condemned him, he surprised her with a visit of farewell, so that he
need not disturb her in the early morning, he said. She was reading
beside her open jewel-box, and she closed it with the delicate touch of a
hand turned backward while listening to him, with no sign of nervousness.

CHAPTER XIII

WAR AT OLMER

Lively doings were on the leap to animate Weyburn at Olmer during Easter
week. The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, rector of Barborough, on hearing that
Lady Charlotte Eglett was engaged in knocking at the doors of litigation
with certain acts that constituted distinct breaches of the law and the
peace, and were a violation of the rights of her neighbour, Mr. Gilbert
Addicote, might hope that the troublesome parishioner whom he did not
often number among his congregation would grant him a term of repose.
Therein he was deceived. Alterations and enlargements of the church, much
required, had necessitated the bricking up of a door regarded by the lady
as the private entrance to the Olmer pew. She sent him notice of her
intention to batter at the new brickwork; so there was the prospect of a
pew-fight before him. But now she came to sit under him every Sunday; and
he could have wished her absent; for she diverted his thoughts from piety
to the selections of texts applicable in the case of a woman who sat with
arms knotted, and the frown of an intemperate schoolgirl forbidden
speech; while her pew's firelight startlingly at intervals danced her
sinister person into view, as from below. The lady's inaccessible and
unconquerable obtuseness to exhortation informed the picture with an evil
spirit that cried for wrestlings.

Regularly every week-day she headed the war now rageing between Olmer and
Addicotes, on the borders of the estates. It was open war, and herself to
head the cavalry. Weyburn, driving up a lane in the gig she had sent to
meet the coach, beheld a thicket of countrymen and boys along a ridge;
and it swayed and broke, and