“Oh, don’t say that, Miss Cotton!” pleaded Alice, pulling away from her embrace, but still clinging to her with her tremulous, cold little hands.  “I can’t bear it!  I’m wicked and hard you don’t know how bad I am; and I’m afraid of being weak, of doing more harm yet.  Oh, I wronged him cruelly in ever letting him get engaged to me!  But now what you’ve said will support me.  If you think I’ve done right—­It must seem strange to you that I should come to you with my trouble instead of my mother; but I’ve been to her, and—­and we think alike on so few subjects, don’t you know—­”

“Yes, yes; I know, dear!” said Miss Cotton, in the tender folly of her heart, with the satisfaction which every woman feels in being more sufficient to another in trouble than her natural comforters.

“And I wanted to know how you saw it; and now, if you feel as you say, I can never doubt myself again.”

She tempested out of Miss Cotton’s house, all tearful under the veil she had pulled down, and as she shut the door of her coupe, Miss Cotton’s heart jumped into her throat with an impulse to run after her, to recall her, to recant, to modify everything.

From that moment Miss Cotton’s trouble began, and it became a torment that mounted and gave her no peace till she imparted it.  She said to herself that she should suffer to the utmost in this matter, and if she spoke to any one, it must not be to same one who had agreed with her about Alice, but to some hard, skeptical nature, some one who would look at it from a totally different point of view, and would punish her for her error, if she had committed an error, in supporting and consoling Alice.  All the time she was thinking of Mrs. Brinkley; Mrs. Brinkley had come into her mind at once; but it was only after repeated struggles that she could get the strength to go to her.

Mrs. Brinkley, sacredly pledged to secrecy, listened with a sufficiently dismaying air to the story which Miss Cotton told her in the extremity of her fear and doubt.

“Well,” she said at the end, “have you written to Mr. Mavering?”

“Written to Mr. Mavering?” gasped Miss Cotton.

“Yes—­to tell him she wants him back.”

“Wants him back?” Miss Cotton echoed again.

“That’s what she came to you for.”

“Oh, Mrs. Brinkley!” moaned Miss Cotton, and she stared at her in mute reproach.

Mrs. Brinkley laughed.  “I don’t say she knew that she came for that; but there’s no doubt that she did; and she went away bitterly disappointed with your consolation and support.  She didn’t want anything of the kind—­you may comfort yourself with that reflection, Miss Cotton.”

“Mrs. Brinkley,” said Miss Cotton, with a severity which ought to have been extremely effective from so mild a person, “do you mean to accuse that poor child of dissimulation—­of deceit—­in such—­a—­a—­”

“No!” shouted Mrs. Brinkley; “she didn’t know what she was doing any more than you did; and she went home perfectly heart-broken; and I hope she’ll stay so, for the good of all parties concerned.”