aid against temptation. He knew it as the one trusty antidote 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 Germa