se of the view of a business in life was 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
alon