‘You must not go just yet,’ she said:  ’I have something to tell you.  I hardly know how to express it.  The shortest way perhaps will be to let you find it out for yourself.  You have been speaking of my lonely unprotected life here.  It is not a very happy life, Henry—­I own that.’  She paused, observing the growing anxiety of his expression as he looked at her, with a shy satisfaction that perplexed him.  ‘Do you know that I have anticipated your idea?’ she went on.  ’I am going to make a great change in my life—­if your brother Stephen and his wife will only consent to it.’  She opened the desk of the writing-table while she spoke, took a letter out, and handed it to Henry.

He received it from her mechanically.  Vague doubts, which he hardly understood himself, kept him silent.  It was impossible that the ’change in her life’ of which she had spoken could mean that she was about to be married—­and yet he was conscious of a perfectly unreasonable reluctance to open the letter.  Their eyes met; she smiled again.  ‘Look at the address,’ she said.  ’You ought to know the handwriting—­ but I dare say you don’t.’

He looked at the address.  It was in the large, irregular, uncertain writing of a child.  He opened the letter instantly.

’Dear Aunt Agnes,—­Our governess is going away.  She has had money left to her, and a house of her own.  We have had cake and wine to drink her health.  You promised to be our governess if we wanted another.  We want you.  Mamma knows nothing about this.  Please come before Mamma can get another governess.  Your loving Lucy, who writes this.  Clara and Blanche have tried to write too.  But they are too young to do it.  They blot the paper.’

‘Your eldest niece,’ Agnes explained, as Henry looked at her in amazement.  ’The children used to call me aunt when I was staying with their mother in Ireland, in the autumn.  The three girls were my inseparable companions—­they are the most charming children I know.  It is quite true that I offered to be their governess, if they ever wanted one, on the day when I left them to return to London.  I was writing to propose it to their mother, just before you came.’

‘Not seriously!’ Henry exclaimed.

Agnes placed her unfinished letter in his hand.  Enough of it had been written to show that she did seriously propose to enter the household of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Westwick as governess to their children!  Henry’s bewilderment was not to be expressed in words.

‘They won’t believe you are in earnest,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ Agnes asked quietly.

‘You are my brother Stephen’s cousin; you are his wife’s old friend.’

’All the more reason, Henry, for trusting me with the charge of their children.’

’But you are their equal; you are not obliged to get your living by teaching.  There is something absurd in your entering their service as a governess!’