dozen times a day,
taking fierce comfort in the knowledge that Ferrier was noble. But she
was destined even to lose that comfort; for one day, a week before the
day when we find her walking to Summerfield station, Ferrier's nobility,
or what poor Agnes took to be such, suddenly broke down.

They had been walking together in Battersea Park, and, after one of
those long silences which bespeak true intimacy between a man and a
woman, he had asked her if she would come back to his rooms--for tea.

She had shaken her head smilingly. And then he had turned on her with a
torrent of impetuous, burning words--words of ardent love, of anguished
longing, of eager pleading. And Agnes had been frightened, fascinated,
allured.

And that had not been all.

More quietly he had gone on to speak as if the code of morality in which
his friend had been bred, and which had hitherto so entirely satisfied
her, was, after all, nothing but a narrow counsel of perfection, suited
to those who were sheltered and happy, but wretchedly inadequate to meet
the needs of the greater number of human beings who are, as Agnes now
was, humiliated and miserable. His words had found an echo in her sore
heart, but she had not let him see how much they moved her. On the
contrary, she had rebuked him, and for the first time they had
quarrelled.

"If you ever speak to me like that again," she had said coldly, "I will
not come again."

And once more he had turned on her violently. "I think you had better
not come again! I am but a man after all!"

They parted enemies; but the same night Ferrier wrote Agnes a very
piteous letter asking pardon on his knees for having spoken as he had
done. And his letter moved her to the heart. Her own deep misery--never
for one moment did she forget Frank, and Frank's treachery--made her
understand the torment that Ferrier was going through.

For the first time she realized, what so few of her kind ever realize,
that it is a mean thing to take everything and give nothing in exchange.
And gradually, as her long, solitary hours wore themselves away, Agnes
came to believe that if she did what she now knew Ferrier desired her to
do,--if, casting the past behind her, she started a new life with
him--she would not only be doing a generous thing by the man who had
loved her silently and faithfully for so long, but she would also be
punishing Frank--hurting him in his honour, as he had hurt her in hers.

And then the stars that