corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and
we cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my lord?'

'It may be as you say, ma'am.'

She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of
palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's.

Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish
gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued
good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on
the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room.

Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece,
was dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment,
positive for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m.,
four o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and
she still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint
around her off the lines. She departed.

Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not
marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more
or less necessitating the infliction he groaned under. He was too lofty
to be questioned, even by his favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the
ghost of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea.
Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride froze a beginning stir
in the bosom of Aminta.

Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman's bosom when he was genial.
He melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its
recent office. That might have failed; but it had support in a second
letter received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr.
Weyburn 'dangerous'; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated
her to 'play little games' for the sole sake of rousing him through
jealousy to a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against
him. She could exult in having read the second letter right through
on receipt of it, and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in
a reflection shot across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous
man's queer mad sentences: 'Be as iron as you like, I will strike you
to heat'; and her thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual
defence?--all while she smiled on her genial lord, and signified
agreement, with a smiting of wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to
a panic shout of the country for defence, and said: 'Much crying of that
kind weakens the power to defend when