Jane would have gone, though, had she known that all her fair name would go with her.  She was right, you see, when she told me, while riding over to Windsor, that should Mary’s love blossom into a full-blown passion she would wreck everything and everybody, including herself perhaps, to attain the object of so great a desire.

It looked now as if she were on the high road to that end.  Nothing short of chains and fetters could have kept her from going to Brandon that evening.  There was an inherent force about her that was irresistible and swept everything before it.

In our garret she was to meet another will, stronger and infinitely better controlled than her own, and I did not know how it would all turn out.

CHAPTER XII

Atonement

I had not been long in the room when a knock at the door announced the girls.  I admitted them, and Mary walked to the middle of the floor.  It was just growing dark and the room was quite dim, save at the window where Brandon sat reading.  Gods! those were exciting moments; my heart beat like a woman’s.  Brandon saw the girls when they entered, but never so much as looked up from his book.  You must remember he had a great grievance.  Even looking at it from Mary’s side of the case, certainly its best point of view, he had been terribly misused, and it was all the worse that the misuse had come from one who, from his standpoint, had pretended to love him, and had wantonly led him on, as he had the best of right to think, to love her, and to suffer the keenest pangs a heart can know.  Then you must remember he did not know even the best side of the matter, bad as it was, but saw only the naked fact, that in recompense for his great help in time of need, Mary had deliberately allowed him to lie in that dungeon a long, miserable month, and would have suffered him to die.  So it was no wonder his heart was filled with bitterness toward her.  Jane and I had remained near the door, and poor Mary was a pitiable princess, standing there so full of doubt in the middle of the room.  After a moment she stepped toward the window, and, with quick-coming breath, stopped at the threshold of the little passage.

“Master Brandon, I have come, not to make excuses, for nothing can excuse me, but to tell you how it all happened—­by trusting to another.”

Brandon arose, and marking the place in his book with his finger, followed Mary, who had stepped backward into the room.

“Your highness is very gracious and kind thus to honor me, but as our ways will hereafter lie as far apart as the world is broad, I think it would have been far better had you refrained from so imprudent a visit; especially as anything one so exalted as yourself may have to say can be no affair of such as I—­one just free of the hangman’s noose.”

“Oh! don’t!  I pray you.  Let me tell you, and it may make a difference.  It must pain you, I know, to think of me as you do, after—­after—­you know; after what has passed between us.”