an, and be mooning over her because she
gave him her eyes and her handwriting when a girl, was enough to
rouse an honest fellow's laugh at himself, in the contemplation of
his intermediate amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known the veritable
passion after Browny sank from his ken? Let it be confessed, never. His
first love was his only true love, despite one shuddering episode, oddly
humiliating to recollect, though he had not behaved badly. So, then,
by right of his passion, thus did eternal justice rule it: that Browny
belonged, to Matey Weyburn, Aminta to Lord Ormont. Aminta was a lady
blooming in the flesh, Browny was the past's pale phantom; for which
reason he could call her his own, without harm done to any one, and
with his usual appetite for dinner, breakfast, lunch, whatever the meal
supplied by the hour.

It would somewhat alarmingly have got to Mr. Weyburn's conscience
through a disturbance of his balance, telling him that he was on a
perilous road, if his relish for food had been blunted. He had his
axiom on the subject, and he was wrong in the general instance, for
the appetites of rogues and ogres are not known to fail. As regarded
himself, he was eminently right; and he could apply it to boys also,
to all young people--the unlaunched, he called them. He counted himself
among the launched, no doubt, and had breasted seas; but the boy was
alive, a trencherman lad, in the coming schoolmaster, and told him
profitable facts concerning his condition; besides throwing a luminous
ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If they have no stout zest
for eating, put Query against them.

His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced Mr. Weyburn that he had
not brooded morbidly over his phantom Browny, and could meet Aminta,
Countess of Ormont, on the next occasion with the sentiments proper to
a common official. Did she not set him a commendable example? He admired
her for not concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite
comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who
had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply
of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He
spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, laughed at
himself.

Aminta's humour was being stirred about the same time. She and her
aunt were at the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. The dinner had
passed with the stiff dialogue peculiar to couples und