ad been glad to see Madame Gordeloup in London--much more glad than
she would have been had she been received there on her return by a crowd
of loving native friends. But not on that account was she prepared to
shape her conduct in accordance with her friend Sophie's advice, and
especially not so when that advice had reference to Sophie's brother.
She had, therefore, said very little in return to the lady's eloquence,
answering the letter on that matter very vaguely; but, having a purpose
of her own, had begged that Count Pateroff might be asked to call upon
Harry Clavering. Count Pateroff did not feel himself to care very much
about Harry Clavering, but wishing to do as he was bidden, did leave his
card in Bloomsbury Square.

And why was Lady Ongar anxious that the young man who was her friend
should see the man who had been her husband's friend, and whose name had
been mixed with her own in so grievous a manner? She had called Harry
her friend, and it might be that she desired to give this friend every
possible means of testing the truth of that story which she herself had
told. The reader, perhaps, will hardly have believed in Lady Ongar's
friendship; will, perhaps, have believed neither the friendship nor the
story. If so, the reader will have done her wrong, and will not have
read her character aright. The woman was not heartless because she had
once, in one great epoch of her life, betrayed her own heart; nor was
she altogether false because she had once lied; nor altogether vile,
because she had once taught herself that, for such an one as her, riches
were a necessity. It might be that the punishment of her sin could meet
with no remission in this world, but not on that account should it be
presumed that there was no place for repentance left to her.

As she walked alone through the shrubberies at Ongar Park she thought
much of those other paths at Clavering, and of the walks in which
she had not been alone; and she thought of that interview in the
garden when she had explained to Harry--as she had then thought so
successfully--that they two, each being poor, were not fit to love and
marry each other. She had brooded over all that, too, during the long
hours of her sad journey home to England. She was thinking of it still
when she had met him, and had been so cold to him on the platform of the
railway station, when she had sent him away angry because she had seemed
to slight him. She had thought of it as she had