Had she really been wrong?  Past remembrances, as well as present troubles, pleaded powerfully with Agnes for the courier’s wife.  ‘It seems only a small favour to ask,’ she said, speaking under the impulse of kindness which was the strongest impulse in her nature.  ’But I am not sure that I ought to allow my name to be mentioned in your husband’s letter.  Let me hear again exactly what he wishes to say.’  Emily repeated the words—­and then offered one of those suggestions, which have a special value of their own to persons unaccustomed to the use of their pens.  ‘Suppose you try, Miss, how it looks in writing?’ Childish as the idea was, Agnes tried the experiment.  ’If I let you mention me,’ she said, ‘we must at least decide what you are to say.’  She wrote the words in the briefest and plainest form:—­’I venture to state that my wife has been known from her childhood to Miss Agnes Lockwood, who feels some little interest in my welfare on that account.’  Reduced to this one sentence, there was surely nothing in the reference to her name which implied that Agnes had permitted it, or that she was even aware of it.  After a last struggle with herself, she handed the written paper to Emily.  ’Your husband must copy it exactly, without altering anything,’ she stipulated.  ’On that condition, I grant your request.’  Emily was not only thankful—­she was really touched.  Agnes hurried the little woman out of the room.  ‘Don’t give me time to repent and take it back again,’ she said.  Emily vanished.

’Is the tie that once bound us completely broken?  Am I as entirely parted from the good and evil fortune of his life as if we had never met and never loved?’ Agnes looked at the clock on the mantel-piece.  Not ten minutes since, those serious questions had been on her lips.  It almost shocked her to think of the common-place manner in which they had already met with their reply.  The mail of that night would appeal once more to Montbarry’s remembrance of her—­ in the choice of a servant.

Two days later, the post brought a few grateful lines from Emily.  Her husband had got the place.  Ferrari was engaged, for six months certain, as Lord Montbarry’s courier.

THE SECOND PART

CHAPTER V

After only one week of travelling in Scotland, my lord and my lady returned unexpectedly to London.  Introduced to the mountains and lakes of the Highlands, her ladyship positively declined to improve her acquaintance with them.  When she was asked for her reason, she answered with a Roman brevity, ‘I have seen Switzerland.’

For a week more, the newly-married couple remained in London, in the strictest retirement.  On one day in that week the nurse returned in a state of most uncustomary excitement from an errand on which Agnes had sent her.  Passing the door of a fashionable dentist, she had met Lord Montbarry himself just leaving the house.  The good woman’s report described him, with malicious pleasure, as looking wretchedly ill.  ’His cheeks are getting hollow, my dear, and his beard is turning grey.  I hope the dentist hurt him!’