Weak as she was, Emily had spirit enough to feel the reproof. She walked in her meek noiseless way to the door. “I beg your pardon, Miss. I am not quite so bad as you think me. But I beg your pardon, all the same.” She opened the door. Agnes called her back. There was something in the woman’s apology that appealed irresistibly to her just and generous nature. “Come,” she said; “we must not part in this way. Let me not misunderstand you. What is it that you expected me to do?” Emily was wise enough to answer this time without any reserve. “My husband will send his testimonials, Miss, to Lord Montbarry in Scotland. I only wanted you to let him say in his letter that his wife has been known to you since she was a child, and that you feel some little interest in his welfare on that account. I don’t ask it now, Miss. You have made me understand that I was wrong.” 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.