Agnes went up to the nursery and bent over Mar’s little crib, and dropped a kiss upon his forehead as soft as the touch of any mother. The child opened his eyes without anything of the startled effect of sudden waking, as if he had only shut his eyes in play. “Why do you say poor child?” he asked in his little soft voice. “Oh, my little Mar, my little Mar!” cried Agnes, and then she scolded him a little for being awake, and bade him shut those big eyes directly and go to sleep. This visit did not dry her tears, or make it more easy to think what she was to do. Indeed Agnes was less and less reconciled to the idea of submitting to Mary’s delusion as she thought it over. It would all have been so very easy otherwise! They might have lived the two together, mother and aunt, in the familiar house of which she had grown so fond during these five years, taking care of the little heir until he was old enough to go to school. His mother was his natural guardian, and so she would have been had it not been for this. It would almost have been better, Agnes thought with bitterness, if she had not recovered at all--if she had still remained with Dr. Brown. For who could tell what the Parkes might do? They would have the power in their hands. They might insist on having her removed again. They might say that still she was not sane, and to prove that a woman was sane who had forgotten the very existence of her child, how difficult would that be. Agnes was the only one in the great house who could not sleep that night. She was sorry, very sorry, too, for the loss of old Frogmore. He had been to her a kind companion, a confiding and respectful brother, and she missed him--more than anyone else who mourned for him. The thought that he was gone and taken away, and that now there would be a clearing out of all his drawers, a searching into all his secrets, his papers examined, his very wardrobe turned inside out, brought tears of sorrow, mingled with a sort of angry dismay, to her eyes. That too, if Mary had but been well, would have been spared. She would have kept the old man’s house sacred. Sorrow and contrariety and care, all the exasperating and irritating elements which make a position intolerable, mingled in the mind of Agnes; and she knew that she could not throw it off as intolerable, but must somehow support everything for the sake of Mary and of the poor little boy. Poor little boy! To think that he was Lord Frogmore, and that after his long minority was over he would be one of the wealthiest peers in England, the poor, little, forlorn child for whom nobody cared, was enough to make any kind woman’s heart overflow with the piteousness of the contrast: and he was dear and precious to Agnes as the apple of her eye.