She was serious herself as she spoke, but her seriousness was extremely gentle. She looked at Bertha even tenderly, and her clear eyes were very expressive. "We are both changed since we met here last," she said, with simple directness, "and it is only natural that what we have lived through should have affected us differently. We are of very different temperaments. You were always more vivid and intense than I, and suffering--if you had suffered"-- Her soft voice faltered a little, and she paused. Bertha turned and looked her unflinchingly in the face. "I--have not suffered," she said. Agnes spoke as simply as before. "I have," she said. Bertha turned sharply away. "I was afraid so," was her response. "If we are to be as near to each other as I hope," Agnes continued, "it would be useless for me to try to conceal from you the one thing which has made me what I am. The effort to hide it would always stand between us and our confidence in each other. It is much simpler to let you know the truth." She put her hands up to her face an instant, and Bertha broke the silence with a curiously incisive question. "Was he very cruel to you?" Agnes withdrew her hands, and if her shadow of a smile had not been so infinitely sad, it would have been bitter. "He could not help it," she said; "and when I was calm enough to reason I knew he was not to blame for my imagination. It was all over in a few months, and he would have been quite content to bear what followed philosophically. When the worst came to the worst, he told me that he had known it could not last, because such things never did; but that he had also known that, even after the inevitable termination, I should always please him and display good taste. He had lived through so much, and I had known so little. I only spoke openly to him once,--one awful day, and after that I scarcely know what happened to me for months. I asked him to let me go away alone, and I went to the sea-side. Since then the sound of the sea has been a terror to me, and yet there are times when I long to hear it. I used to tell myself that, on one of those days when I sat on the sand and looked at the sea, I died, and that I have never really lived since. Something happened to me--I don't know what. It was one brilliant morning, when the sun beat on the blue water and the white sand, and everything was a dazzling glare. I sat on the beach for hours without moving, and when I got up and walked away I remember hearing myself saying, 'I have left you behind,--I have left you behind,--I shall never see you again.' I was ill for several days afterward, and when I recovered I seemed to have become a new creature. When my husband came I was able to meet him so calmly that I think it was even a kind of shock to him." "And that was the end?" said Bertha. "Yes, that was the end--for me." "And for him?" "Once or twice afterward it interested him to try experiments with me, and when they failed he was not pleased."