“I congratulate you. I feel--I feel quite happy in having served as a foil to such a perfect creature. I won’t take up any more of your time, Mrs. Braithwaite,” said he, rushing to the door and groping blindly for the handle, having forgotten his hat in his excitement. “Don’t go away like that!” said Annie, following him and sobbing, meekly. “I have behaved very, very badly; it was all through my conceit in thinking I could not do anything wrong just because I did not mean to. Will you forgive me, Mr. Cooke?” “No, I won’t--I can’t, Mrs. Braithwaite!” “Do forgive me, Aubrey!” He held out only one second longer, then took her little hands and kissed them again and again. “You are the only woman who has ever treated me badly, and the only woman I shall ever care a straw about. It is always like that, I believe. Good-bye, Annie. I shall be married in a month, and dead in two, I expect. Good-bye.” And he tore a little rosebud from the bouquet near her throat, and was out of the room and out of the house before she could answer. Her faults were punishing her bitterly now. She threw herself upon the sofa in an agony of remorse and wretchedness, feeling that she had behaved badly all round, that she was abandoned by every one, and that she had deserved every pang which could torment her. She had trifled with Aubrey, despised her husband, and now they both looked down upon her and treated her as she deserved. When the first excess of her grief and humiliation was over, her thoughts all flowed into one channel, and the question which absorbed her was, would Harry ever come back to a wife for whom he must, in spite of his patience with her through that week at the end of which he had run away, entertain at heart so great a contempt? She was herself surprised at the persistency with which her thoughts returned to the husband whom she had so disliked and despised at the time when no self-reproach at the faults in her own conduct had risen to disturb the placid superiority she felt over him. She had begun to fret herself into a fever of anxiety at the thought that she would never hear from him again, when, on her return home from a walk one afternoon, she was told by the servant that a lady and gentleman were in her sitting-room. “They did not come together, ma’am. The lady came first, and presently the gentleman; and, when they heard you were out, they both said they would wait for you. So I showed them both up-stairs, ma’am.” In the sitting-room Annie found Stephen, whom she had rightly guessed to be one of the visitors, and Muriel West, whom she certainly neither expected nor wished to see. This lady, whose coarseness had in the very first days of their forced acquaintanceship on tour disgusted Annie, had nevertheless shown the latter so much good-natured kindness in many little ways, and notably when the younger actress was ill with neuralgia, that it was impossible for her not to receive the unwelcome guest with cordiality.