s. Pagnell
had an engagement at the house of Lady Staines for the next day to
meet titles and celebrities, and it precluded her comprehension of the
project. She begged to have the journey postponed. She had pledged her
word, she said.

'To Mr. Morsfield?' said Aminta.

Her aunt was astounded.

'I did tell him we should be there, my dear.' 'He appears to have a
pleasure in meeting you.' 'He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.'

'You correspond with him?'

'I may not be the only one.'

'Foolish aunty! How can you speak to me in that senseless way?' cried
Aminta. 'You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from
his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.'

'My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know
I shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead
silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces. It is their way
of letting one feel they are of birth above us. Mr. Morsfield--purer
blood than many of their highest titles--is always polite, always
deferential; he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the
sphere I prefer. We shall be travelling alone?'

'Have you any fear?'

'Not if nothing happens. Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?'

'He has much work to do. He will not long be here. He is absent to-day.'

Mrs. Pagnell remarked: 'I must say he earns his money easily.'

Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his
time with them. Her aunt's coarse hint, and the thought of his loss, and
the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked a
sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her
eyes from sight. She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.
Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of
tears.

CHAPTER XVI. ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON

Unaccountable resolutions, if impromptu and springing from the female
breast, are popularly taken for caprices; and even when they divert the
current of a history, and all the more when they are very small matters
producing a memorable crisis. In this way does a lazy world consign
discussion to silence with the cynical closure. Man's hoary shrug at a
whimsy sex is the reading of his enigma still.

But ask if she has the ordinary pumping heart in that riddle of a
breast: and then, as the organ cannot avoid pursuit, we may get hold of
it, and succeed in spelling out that she is