There was just sufficient truth mixed with the injustice of these harsh words to go to the heart of poor Agnes. Her aunt Compton, in reply to a letter of Mrs. Barnaby, written in a spirit of wanton impertinence, and in which she made a formal demand of one hundred pounds a-year for the expenses of Agnes, answered in great wrath, that she and Agnes both had better take care not to change their residence so often as to lose a parish settlement, for they might live to find _that_ a much better dependence than anything they would obtain from her. This pettish epistle, received the day before they left Silverton, was carefully treasured by Mrs. Barnaby, and often referred to when she was anxious to impress on her niece a sense of her forlorn condition and helpless dependence. So all hope from that quarter seemed to be for ever shut out.... And could she forget that even at the moment when the dangers of her situation had so forcibly struck Lady Elizabeth Norris, as to make her approve what she had before declared to be worse than _any home_,--that even at that moment she had explicitly declared that neither herself nor her niece could _take charge of her_? These were mournful thoughts; and it was no great proof of Agnes's wisdom, perhaps, that, instead of immediately proceeding to the performance of her prescribed task, she sat down expressly to ruminate upon them. But the meditation was not permitted to be long; for hardly had she rested her elbow upon the table, and her cheek upon her hand, in the manner which ladies under such circumstances always do, than she was startled by a violent knocking and simultaneous ringing at the street-door, followed, as soon as it was opened, by a mixture of two or three loud and angry voices, amidst which she clearly distinguished that of her aunt; and the moment after she burst into the room, accompanied by the gentleman who had appeared to admire her so greatly in the street the day before, together with two other much less well-looking personages, who stuck close upon the heels of Mrs. Barnaby, with more appearance of authority than respect. "You shall live to repent this treatment of a lady," cried Mrs. Barnaby, addressing the hero of her yesterday's adventure, who was no other than the keeper of the livery-stable from whom she had hired the carriage and horses which had dignified her existence for the last month. "You shall be taught to know what is due from a trumpery country tradesman like you, to a person of my fortune and station. What put it into your head, you vile fellow, instead of waiting my return to Cheltenham, to follow me to London in this abominable manner, and to arrest me in the public streets?"