her conduct in accordance with her friend Sophie’s advice, and especially not so when that advice had reference to Sophie’s brother.  She had, therefore, said very little in return to the lady’s eloquence, answering the letter on that matter very vaguely; but, having a purpose of her own, had begged that Count Pateroff might be asked to call upon Harry Clavering.  Count Pateroff did not feel himself to care very much about Harry Clavering, but wishing to do as he was bidden, did leave his card in Bloomsbury Square.

And why was Lady Ongar anxious that the young man who was her friend should see the man who had been her husband’s friend, and whose name had been mixed with her own in so grievous a manner?  She had called Harry her friend, and it might be that she desired to give this friend every possible means of testing the truth of that story which she herself had told.  The reader, perhaps, will hardly have believed in Lady Ongar’s friendship; will, perhaps, have believed neither the friendship nor the story.  If so, the reader will have done her wrong, and will not have read her character aright.  The woman was not heartless because she had once, in one great epoch of her life, betrayed her own heart; nor was she altogether false because she had once lied; nor altogether vile, because she had once taught herself that, for such an one as her, riches were a necessity.  It might be that the punishment of her sin could meet with no remission in this world, but not on that account should it be presumed that there was no place for repentance left to her.

As she walked alone through the shrubberies at Ongar Park she thought much of those other paths at Clavering, and of the walks in which she had not been alone; and she thought of that interview in the garden when she had explained to Harry—­as she had then thought so successfully—­that they two, each being poor, were not fit to love and marry each other.  She had brooded over all that, too, during the long hours of her sad journey home to England.  She was thinking of it still when she had met him, and had been so cold to him on the platform of the railway station, when she had sent him away angry because she had seemed to slight him.  She had thought of it as she had sat in her London room, telling him the terrible tale of her married life, while her eyes were fixed on his and her head was resting on her hands.  Even then, at that moment, she was asking herself whether he believed her story, or whether, within his breast, he was saying that she was vile and false.  She knew that she had been false to him, and that he must have despised her when, with her easy philosophy, she had made the best of her own mercenary perfidy.  He had called her a jilt to her face, and she had been able to receive the accusation with a smile.  Would he now call her something worse, and in a louder voice, within his own bosom?  And if she could convince him that to that accusation she was not fairly subject, might the old thing come back again?  Would he walk with her again, and look into her eyes as though he only wanted her commands to show himself ready to be her slave?  She was a widow, and had seen many things, but even now she had not reached her six-and-twentieth year.