"Get over it!" she cried. "How often do you suppose I have said to myself that I _must_ get over it? How many thousand times? I _must_ get over it. Is it a thing to trifle with and be sentimental over? It is a degradation. I don't spare myself. No one could say to me more than I say to myself. I cannot spare it, and I must get over it; but I don't--I don't--I don't. And sometimes the horrible thought comes to me that it is a thing you can't get over, and it drives me mad, but--but"-- "But what?" said Agnes. Her hands dropped away from her face. "If I tell you this," she said, breathlessly, "you will despise me. I think I am going to tell it to you that you _may_ despise me. The torture of it will be a sort of penance. When the thought comes to me that I _may_ get over it, that it will go out of my life in time, and be lost forever, then I know that, compared to that, all the rest is nothing--nothing; and that I could bear it for an eternity, the anguish and the shame and the bitterness, if only it might not be taken away." "Oh!" cried Agnes, "I can believe it! I can believe it!" "You can believe it?" said Bertha, fiercely. "You? Yes. But I--I cannot!" For some minutes after this Agnes did not speak. She sat still and looked down at Bertha's cowering figure. There came back to her, with terrible distinctness, times when she herself must have looked so,--only she had always been alone,--and there mingled with the deep feeling of the moment a far-away pity for her own helpless youth and despair. "Will you tell me," she said, at last, "how it began?" She was struck, when Bertha lifted her face from its cushions, by the change which had come upon her. All traces of intense and passionate feeling were gone; it was as if her weeping had swept them away, and left only a weariness, which made her look pathetically young and helpless. As she watched her Agnes wondered if she had ever looked up at Tredennis with such eyes. "I think," she said, "that it was long before I knew. If I had not been so young and so thoughtless I think I should have known that I began to care for him before he went away the first time. But I was very young, and he was so quiet. There was one day, when he brought me some heliotrope, when I wondered why I liked the quiet things he said; and after he went away I used to wonder, in a sort of fitful way, what he was doing. And the first time I found myself face to face with a trouble I thought of him, and wished for him, without knowing why. I even began a letter to him; but I was too timid to send it." "Oh, if you had sent it!" Agnes exclaimed, involuntarily. "Yes--if I had sent it! But I did not. Perhaps it would not have made much difference if I had, only when I told him of it"-- "You told him of it?" said Agnes.