for a few hours
alone?"

"Oh, no! Oh, no!" And Agatha went back to the drawing-room with her
sisters-in-law.

Alone! The word she had repudiated rose up like a spirit, everywhere,
all over the house. Not a room but what seemed empty, strange. Fast and
busily the Miss Harpers talked--yet all around was, oh! such silence.
The silence that we feel in a house when some voice and step has gone
out of it, which no one misses except we, and which we miss as we should
miss the daylight or the sun.

When all grew quiet, and Agatha sat in her own room--expecting nothing,
for she knew he would not come--but still sitting, with her hair falling
damp about her, and her eyes fixed on the mirror for company, yet
half growing frightened as if it were a strange object on which she
gazed--then, indeed, there was silence--then, indeed, she was _alone_.

CHAPTER XIX.

Mr. Harper did not ride home by midnight, as his wife was well assured
he would not do, though with some idle hope put into her mind by
Eulalie, she sat at the window until the stars whitened in the dawn.

At noon--which seemed to come slowly, every hour a day--Mr. Dugdale
appeared with a message, which by some wondrous good fortune he
remembered to deliver--that Nathanael had returned from Weymouth to
Kingcombe, and was waiting there. Agatha gathered with difficulty that
her husband wished her to return with Mr. Dugdale.

"I will not go."

"That's right! I wouldn't do it upon any account," said Eulalie, with
not the kindest of laughs. "I wouldn't be sent for like a school-girl.
Let Nathanael come himself and fetch you. What a rude fellow he is!"

"Eulalie!--You forget you are speaking of your brother and my husband. I
will be ready in five minutes, Mr. Dugdale."

Duke lifted his placid but observant eyes, and smiled. "That's good.
Come along, my child."

He had never spoken so kindly to her before. It was as if he read her
trouble. Her anger faded--she was near bursting in tears. In a little
while she had taken the good man's arm--which Eulalie pointedly informed
her was not the fashion at Kingcombe--and was walking with him to meet
her husband.

Marmaduke talked but little; marching on leisurely in a meditative mood,
and leaving his young sister-in-law to follow his example. Once or twice
she felt stealing down upon her one of his kindly, paternal glances,
and heard him saying to himself his usual winding-up of every mental
difficulty:

"Eh!--We know