More than once there was the mist of tears in the flower-blue eyes when Lady Agatha came to talk.  Confidence between two women establishes itself through processes at once subtle and simple.  Emily Fox-Seton could not have told when she first began to know that the beauty was troubled and distressed; Lady Agatha did not know when she first slipped into making little frank speeches about herself; but these things came about.  Agatha found something like comfort in her acquaintance with the big, normal, artless creature—­something which actually raised her spirits when she was depressed.  Emily Fox-Seton paid constant kindly tribute to her charms, and helped her to believe in them.  When she was with her, Agatha always felt that she really was lovely, after all, and that loveliness was a great capital.  Emily admired and revered it so, and evidently never dreamed of doubting its omnipotence.  She used to talk as if any girl who was a beauty was a potential duchess.  In fact, this was a thing she quite ingenuously believed.  She had not lived in a world where marriage was a thing of romance, and, for that matter, neither had Agatha.  It was nice if a girl liked the man who married her, but if he was a well-behaved, agreeable person, of good means, it was natural that she would end by liking him sufficiently; and to be provided for comfortably or luxuriously for life, and not left upon one’s own hands or one’s parents’, was a thing to be thankful for in any case.  It was such a relief to everybody to know that a girl was “settled,” and especially it was such a relief to the girl herself.  Even novels and plays were no longer fairy-stories of entrancing young men and captivating young women who fell in love with each other in the first chapter, and after increasingly picturesque incidents were married in the last one in the absolute surety of being blissfully happy forevermore.  Neither Lady Agatha nor Emily had been brought up on this order of literature, nor in an atmosphere in which it was accepted without reservation.

They had both had hard lives, and knew what lay before them.  Agatha knew she must make a marriage or fade out of existence in prosaic and narrowed dulness.  Emily knew that there was no prospect for her of desirable marriage at all.  She was too poor, too entirely unsupported by social surroundings, and not sufficiently radiant to catch the roving eye.  To be able to maintain herself decently, to be given an occasional treat by her more fortunate friends, and to be allowed by fortune to present to the face of the world the appearance of a woman who was not a pauper, was all she could expect.  But she felt that Lady Agatha had the right to more.  She did not reason the matter out and ask herself why she had the right to more, but she accepted the proposition as a fact.  She was ingenuously interested in her fate, and affectionately sympathetic.  She used to look at Lord Walderhurst quite anxiously at times when he was talking to the