‘Is it true,’ she asked, after a long silence, ’that they have been married to-day?’

He answered ungraciously in the one necessary word:—­’Yes.’

‘Did you go to the church?’

He resented the question with an expression of indignant surprise.  ‘Go to the church?’ he repeated.  ‘I would as soon go to—­’ He checked himself there.  ‘How can you ask?’ he added in lower tones.  ’I have never spoken to Montbarry, I have not even seen him, since he treated you like the scoundrel and the fool that he is.’

She looked at him suddenly, without saying a word.  He understood her, and begged her pardon.  But he was still angry.  ‘The reckoning comes to some men,’ he said, ’even in this world.  He will live to rue the day when he married that woman!’

Agnes took a chair by his side, and looked at him with a gentle surprise.

’Is it quite reasonable to be so angry with her, because your brother preferred her to me?’ she asked.

Henry turned on her sharply.  ’Do you defend the Countess, of all the people in the world?’

‘Why not?’ Agnes answered.  ’I know nothing against her.  On the only occasion when we met, she appeared to be a singularly timid, nervous person, looking dreadfully ill; and being indeed so ill that she fainted under the heat of my room.  Why should we not do her justice?  We know that she was innocent of any intention to wrong me; we know that she was not aware of my engagement—­’

Henry lifted his hand impatiently, and stopped her.  ‘There is such a thing as being too just and too forgiving!’ he interposed.  ’I can’t bear to hear you talk in that patient way, after the scandalously cruel manner in which you have been treated.  Try to forget them both, Agnes.  I wish to God I could help you to do it!’

Agnes laid her hand on his arm.  ’You are very good to me, Henry; but you don’t quite understand me.  I was thinking of myself and my trouble in quite a different way, when you came in.  I was wondering whether anything which has so entirely filled my heart, and so absorbed all that is best and truest in me, as my feeling for your brother, can really pass away as if it had never existed.  I have destroyed the last visible things that remind me of him.  In this world I shall see him no more.  But is the tie that once bound us, completely broken?  Am I as entirely parted from the good and evil fortune of his life as if we had never met and never loved?  What do you think, Henry?  I can hardly believe it.’

‘If you could bring the retribution on him that he has deserved,’ Henry Westwick answered sternly, ’I might be inclined to agree with you.’

As that reply passed his lips, the old nurse appeared again at the door, announcing another visitor.

’I’m sorry to disturb you, my dear.  But here is little Mrs. Ferrari wanting to know when she may say a few words to you.’

Agnes turned to Henry, before she replied.  ’You remember Emily Bidwell, my favourite pupil years ago at the village school, and afterwards my maid?  She left me, to marry an Italian courier, named Ferrari—­and I am afraid it has not turned out very well.  Do you mind my having her in here for a minute or two?’