change in her voice when she spoke next. It expressed that last
worst resignation which has done with hope.

'You good innocent creature,' she said, 'what does your amiable
forgiveness matter? What are your poor little wrongs, in the reckoning
for greater wrongs which is demanded of me? I am not trying to
frighten you, I am only miserable about myself. Do you know what it is
to have a firm presentiment of calamity that is coming to you--and yet
to hope that your own positive conviction will not prove true? When I
first met you, before my marriage, and first felt your influence over
me, I had that hope. It was a starveling sort of hope that lived a
lingering life in me until to-day. You struck it dead, when you
answered my question about Ferrari.'

'How have I destroyed your hopes?' Agnes asked. 'What connection is
there between my permitting Ferrari to use my name to Lord Montbarry,
and the strange and dreadful things you are saying to me now?'

'The time is near, Miss Lockwood, when you will discover that for
yourself. In the mean while, you shall know what my fear of you is, in
the plainest words I can find. On the day when I took your hero from
you and blighted your life--I am firmly persuaded of it!--you were made
the instrument of the retribution that my sins of many years had
deserved. Oh, such things have happened before to-day! One person has,
before now, been the means of innocently ripening the growth of evil in
another. You have done that already--and you have more to do yet. You
have still to bring me to the day of discovery, and to the punishment
that is my doom. We shall meet again--here in England, or there in
Venice where my husband died--and meet for the last time.'

In spite of her better sense, in spite of her natural superiority to
superstitions of all kinds, Agnes was impressed by the terrible
earnestness with which those words were spoken. She turned pale as she
looked at Henry. 'Do you understand her?' she asked.

'Nothing is easier than to understand her,' he replied contemptuously.
'She knows what has become of Ferrari; and she is confusing you in a
cloud of nonsense, because she daren't own the truth. Let her go!'

If a dog had been under one of the chairs, and had barked, Lady
Montbarry could not have proceeded more impenetrably with the last
words she had to say to Agnes.

'Advise your interesting Mrs. Ferrari to wait a little longer,' she
said. 'You will know what has become of her hu