ometime intimate friend and contemporary, who was neither
good nor happy.

This was Teresa Maldo, the lovely half-Spanish girl who had been her
favourite schoolmate at the convent over the hill.

Poor, foolish, unhappy, wicked Teresa! Only ten days ago Teresa had done
a thing so extraordinary, so awful, so unprecedented, that Agnes Barlow
had thought of little else ever since. Teresa Maldo had eloped, gone
right away from her home and her husband, and with a married man!

Teresa and Agnes were the same age; they had had the same upbringing;
they were both--in a very different way, however--beautiful, and they
had each been married, six years before, on the same day of the month.

But how different had been their subsequent fates!

Teresa had at once discovered that her husband drank. But she loved him,
and for a while it seemed as if marriage would reform Maldo.
Unfortunately, this better state of things did not last: he again began
to drink: and the matrons of Summerfield soon had reason to shake their
heads over the way Teresa Maldo went on.

Men, you see, were so sorry for this lovely young woman, blessed (or
cursed) with what old-fashioned folk call "the come-hither eye," that
they made it their business to console her for such a worthless husband
as was Maldo. No wonder Teresa and Agnes drifted apart; no wonder Frank
Barlow soon forbade his spotless Agnes to accept Mrs. Maldo's
invitations. And Agnes knew that her dear Frank was right; she had never
much enjoyed her visits to Teresa's house.

But an odd thing had happened about a fortnight ago. And it was to this
odd happening that Agnes's mind persistently recurred each time she
found herself alone.

About three days before Teresa Maldo had done the mad and wicked thing
of which all Summerfield was still talking, she had paid a long call on
Agnes Barlow.

The unwelcome guest had stayed a very long time; she had talked, as she
generally did talk now, wildly and rather strangely; and Agnes, looking
back, was glad to remember that no one else had come in while her old
schoolfellow was there.

When, at last, Teresa Maldo had made up her mind to go (luckily, some
minutes before Frank was due home from town), Agnes accompanied her to
the gate of The Haven, and there the other had turned round and made
such odd remarks.

"I came to tell you something!" she had exclaimed. "But, now that I see
you looking so happy, so pretty, and--forgive me for saying so,
Ag