The invitation was perplexing; but I reflected that the earl and Countess were alike ignorant of the relations that had existed between their daughter and me, and the sharp wrench by which those tender relations had been so suddenly broken. I could not refuse; and if I accepted, how was I to meet Louisa? And now, what said Cora? Her dear little note was brief and rapid, but explained all, and more than I could have hoped for. Miss Agnes Auriol, on seeing the false position in which Berkeley had contrived to place me, had generously transmitted, last night, by her old nurse, all the letters she possessed of Mr. Berkeley, and these had served completely to explain her relations with him, and to exonerate me, affording a complete clue to what had already excited their suspicion and surprise—Berkeley’s intimate knowledge of the cottage, and the strange fact of his possessing a latch-key for it. "Louisa knows everything, and now believes that she has been too precipitate;" so ran the note. "Restore her ring when you meet, and I shall tell you a great deal when we see you here. It is Louisa’s request that you meet her as if nothing had taken place. Will you believe it, that yesterday morning, before that horrid scene occurred, Berkeley had actually proposed to her in form, and been rejected—rejected, dear Newton, and for you? (This part of the note was singularly blurred, blotted, and ill-expressed for Cora.) I need not tell you to make yourself pleasant, for papa is expected, and Lord Slubber is to be here." A postscript added that the packet of letters had been returned to the cottage that morning by a servant—but he found the place locked up, and the inmates gone, none could tell him whither; so, in this dilemma, they had been posted to Berkeley himself, at Maidstone barracks.[*] [*] When serving in the East, a paragraph in a Welsh newspaper recorded the death of Agnes Auriol in the parish where her father had been incumbent. She was found dead at the stile which led to the village burying-ground; and the verdict of the jury was "Death by the visitation of God." I answered the notes, gave them to Pitblado to post, and turned along the Ashford Road like one in a dream, letting the reins drop on my horse’s neck, and having ample food for serious reflection and mature consideration; for all these meetings, communications, and passages so momentous to me had been crammed into the short space of barely two days. There were yet three days to pass before I should again see Louisa, hear her voice, and be gladdened by her smile. Three days were a short invitation to a fashionable household, even to an officer in country quarters, but they seemed three centuries to me.