all. Then
again, if it were discovered it might seriously compromise both Mary
and Jane, as the world is full of people who would rather say and
believe an evil thing of another than to say their prayers or to
believe the holy creed.

I had said as much to the Lady Mary when she expressed her
determination to go to Brandon. She had been in the wrong so much of
late that she was humbled; and I was brave enough to say whatever I
felt; but she said she had thought it all over, and as every one was
away from Greenwich it would not be found out if done secretly.

She told Jane she need not go; that she, Mary, did not want to take
any risk of compromising her.

You see, trouble was doing a good work in the princess, and had made
it possible for a generous thought for another to find spontaneous
lodgment in her heart. What a great thing it is, this human suffering,
which so sensitizes our sympathy, and makes us tender to another's
pain. Nothing else so fits us for earth or prepares us for heaven.

Jane would have gone, though, had she known that all her fair name
would go with her. She was right, you see, when she told me, while
riding over to Windsor, that should Mary's love blossom into a
full-blown passion she would wreck everything and everybody, including
herself perhaps, to attain the object of so great a desire.

It looked now as if she were on the high road to that end. Nothing
short of chains and fetters could have kept her from going to Brandon
that evening. There was an inherent force about her that was
irresistible and swept everything before it.

In our garret she was to meet another will, stronger and infinitely
better controlled than her own, and I did not know how it would all
turn out.

_CHAPTER XII_

_Atonement_

I had not been long in the room when a knock at the door announced the
girls. I admitted them, and Mary walked to the middle of the floor. It
was just growing dark and the room was quite dim, save at the window
where Brandon sat reading. Gods! those were exciting moments; my heart
beat like a woman's. Brandon saw the girls when they entered, but
never so much as looked up from his book. You must remember he had a
great grievance. Even looking at it from Mary's side of the case,
certainly its best point of view, he had been terribly misused, and it
was all the worse that the misuse had come from one who, from his
standpoint, had _pretended_ to love him, and had wantonly led him on