‘Oh! I didn’t think they were that,’ said Dolores, ‘for it was true that father did not leave anything with me for Uncle Alfred. And I did not know whether it was me whom he saw at Darminster. I did tell you one once, Aunt Lily, when you asked if I gave Constance a note. At least, she gave it to me, and not I to her. Indeed, I don’t tell falsehoods, Aunt Lily--I mean I never did at home, but Constance said everybody said those sort of things at school, and that one was driven to it when one was---’ ‘Was what, my dear?’ ‘Tyrannized over,’ Dolores got out. ‘Ah! Dolly, I am afraid Constance was no real friend. It was a great mistake to think her like Miss Hacket.’ ‘And now she has sent back all my notes, and won’t look at me or speak to me,’ and Dolores’s tears began afresh. ‘It is very ungenerous of her, but very likely she will be very sorry to have done so when her first anger is over, and she understands that you were quite as much deceived as she was.’ ‘But I shall never care for her again. It is not like Mysie, who never stopped being kind all the time--nor Gillian either. I shall cut her next time!’ ‘You should remember that she has something to forgive. I don’t want you to be intimate with her but I think it would be better if, instead of quarrelling openly, you wrote a note to say that you were deceived and that you are very sorry for what you brought on her.’ ‘I should not have gone on with it but for her and Her stupid poems!’ ‘Can you bear to tell me how it all was, my dear? I do not half understand it.’ And on the way home, and in Lady Merrifield’s own room Dolores found it a relief to pour forth an explanation of the whole affair, beginning with that meeting with Mr. Flinders at Exeter, of which no one had heard, and going on to her indignation at the inspection of her letters; and how Constance had undertaken to conduct her correspondence, ‘and that made it seem as if she must write to some one,’--so she wrote to Uncle Alfred. And then Constance, becoming excited at the prospect of a literary connection, all the rest followed. It was a great relief to have told it all, and Lady Merrifield was glad to see that the sense of deceit was what weighed most heavily upon her niece, and seemed to have depressed her all along. Indeed, the aunt came to the conclusion that though Dolores alone might still have been sullen, morose and disagreeable, perhaps very reserved, she never would have kept up the systematic deceit but for Constance. The errors, regarded as sin, weighed on Lady Merrifield’s mind, but she judged it wiser not to press that thought on an unprepared spirit, trusting that just as Dolores had wakened to the sense of the human love that surrounded her, hitherto disbelieved and disregarded, so she might yet awake to the feeling of the Divine love and her offence against it.