ective moralty, she believed; and loathed
herself for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class. But
it was not the class, it was against her lord as representative of the
class, that she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging
him. Her enveloping mind was black on him. Such as one of those hard
slaughtering men could call her his own? She breathed short and breathed
deep. Her bitter reason had but the common pity for a madman despatched
to his rest. Yet she knew hatred of her lord in his being suspected as
instigator or accomplice of the hand that dealt the blow. He became to
her thought a python whose coils were about her person, insufferable to
the gaze backward.

Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly
conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity's offspring. Thunderclouds have
as little love of the lightnings they fling.

Aminta was aware only of her torment. The trees were bending, the water
hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious
people in surges of wreck. She scorned the meaningless shake of the
garments of earth, and exclaimed: 'If we were by the sea to-night!'

'I shall be to-morrow night,' said Selina. 'I shall think of you. Oh!
would you come with me?'

'Would you have me?'

'My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.'

'Write to her before the post is out.'

'We shall travel down together?'

Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying,
that down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta. She was
bidden to haste.

CHAPTER XXVI. VISITS OF FAREWELL

The noise in London over Adolphus Morsfield's tragical end disturbed
Lord Ormont much less than the cessation of letters from his Aminta;
and that likewise, considering his present business on her behalf, he
patiently shrugged at and pardoned, foreseeing her penitent air.
He could do it lightly after going some way to pardon his offending
country. For Aminta had not offended, his robust observation of her was
moved to the kindly humorous by a reflective view here and there of the
downright woman her clever little shuffles exposed her to be, not worse.
It was her sex that made her one of the gliders in grasses, some of
whom are venomous; but she belonged to the order only as an innocuous
blindworm. He could pronounce her small by-play with Morsfield innocent,
her efforts to climb the stairs into Society quite innocent; jud