The last crystal drops of trust and tenderness, she thought, were dried up; all was parched, fiery hatred.  Now she need no longer check her resentment by the fear of doing him an injustice:  he had trifled with her, as Maynard had said; he had been reckless of her; and now he was base and cruel.  She had cause enough for her bitterness and anger; they were not so wicked as they had seemed to her.

As these thoughts were hurrying after each other like so many sharp throbs of fevered pain, she shed no tear.  She paced restlessly to and fro, as her habit was—­her hands clenched, her eyes gleaming fiercely and wandering uneasily, as if in search of something on which she might throw herself like a tigress.

‘If I could speak to him,’ she whispered, ’and tell him I hate him, I despise him, I loathe him!’

Suddenly, as if a new thought had struck her, she drew a key from her pocket, and, unlocking an inlaid desk where she stored up her keepsakes, took from it a small miniature.  It was in a very slight gold frame, with a ring to it, as if intended to be worn on a chain; and under the glass at the back were two locks of hair, one dark and the other auburn, arranged in a fantastic knot.  It was Anthony’s secret present to her a year ago a copy he had had made specially for her.  For the last month she had not taken it from its hiding-place:  there was no need to heighten the vividness of the past.  But now she clutched it fiercely, and dashed it across the room against the bare hearth-stone.

Will she crush it under her feet, and grind it under her high-heeled shoe, till every trace of those false cruel features is gone?  Ah, no!  She rushed across the room; but when she saw the little treasure she had cherished so fondly, so often smothered with kisses, so often laid under her pillow, and remembered with the first return of consciousness in the morning—­when she saw this one visible relic of the too happy past lying with the glass shivered, the hair fallen out, the thin ivory cracked, there was a revulsion of the overstrained feeling:  relenting came, and she burst into tears.

Look at her stooping down to gather up her treasure, searching for the hair and replacing it, and then mournfully examining the crack that disfigures the once-loved image.  Alas! there is no glass now to guard either the hair or the portrait; but see how carefully she wraps delicate paper round it, and locks it up again in its old place.  Poor child!  God send the relenting may always come before the worst irrevocable deed!

This action had quieted her, and she sat down to read Maynard’s letter again.  She read it two or three times without seeming to take in the sense; her apprehension was dulled by the passion of the last hour, and she found it difficult to call up the ideas suggested by the words.  At last she began to have a distinct conception of the impending interview with Sir Christopher.  The idea of displeasing