She even went the length of blaming herself for feeling, as she had felt on Sir Percival's suggesting to her that Claude had come to love Clare, that it was the decree of Heaven that she should punish the man for his cruelty to her. She knew that it had been a grim satisfaction for her to reflect that his punishment was coming. She had, in her blindness, fancied that it was to assume the form of his rejection by Clare, and she had hoped to see him crushed as he had crushed her. “Ah, if I had not been so willing to see him humiliated I might still have had a chance of averting the blow which has fallen on both of them--that is the worst of it, on both of them!” This was actually the direction which was taken by her self-reproaches as she lay in her tears with no hope of sleep for her that night. She felt, however, that though she had been to blame in some measure for the catastrophe which had come about, she could not in the supreme moment have acted otherwise than she had done. Claude had said truly that the girl at least was innocent. He who a few weeks before had attempted to justify his thirst for revenge by quoting the awful curse “unto the third and fourth generation” had, when it suited him, talked about the innocence of the girl--about the injustice of visiting upon her head the sins of her father. But Agnes knew that she had done what was right in refusing to allow him to see Clare again unless to tell her the truth about her father. The way he had shrunk from her at the moment of her entering the room, not daring even to glance at her--the way he had cried those words, “Take her away, take her away,” convinced Agnes that she had acted rightly and that she had saved Clare from a lifetime of sorrow. Before the end of a month he would have come to look at her with horror. He would seem to see in her features those of her father--the man who had crept behind Dick Westwood in the dark and shot him dead. But then she began to ask herself if she had been equally right in telling Claude Westwood what was the true name of Clare. She reflected upon the fact that only she knew that Clare was the daughter of the man Standish, who was undergoing his life-sentence of penal servitude for the murder of Dick Westwood. If she had kept that dreadful secret to herself, Claude would have married the girl, and they might have lived happily in ignorance of all that she, Agnes, knew. Yes, but how was she to be certain that no one else in the world shared her secret? How was she to know that the unhappy woman who had been married to Carton Standish, and had in consequence become estranged from all her friends in England--for the man, though of a good family, had been from the first an unscrupulous scamp--was right when she had told her in the letter, which Clare had delivered with her own hand, that no one knew the secret?