y in the one necessary word:--'Yes.'
'Did you go to the church?'
He resented the question with an expression of indignant surprise. 'Go
to the church?' he repeated. 'I would as soon go to--' He checked
himself there. 'How can you ask?' he added in lower tones. 'I have
never spoken to Montbarry, I have not even seen him, since he treated
you like the scoundrel and the fool that he is.'
She looked at him suddenly, without saying a word. He understood her,
and begged her pardon. But he was still angry. 'The reckoning comes
to some men,' he said, 'even in this world. He will live to rue the
day when he married that woman!'
Agnes took a chair by his side, and looked at him with a gentle
surprise.
'Is it quite reasonable to be so angry with her, because your brother
preferred her to me?' she asked.
Henry turned on her sharply. 'Do you defend the Countess, of all the
people in the world?'
'Why not?' Agnes answered. 'I know nothing against her. On the only
occasion when we met, she appeared to be a singularly timid, nervous
person, looking dreadfully ill; and being indeed so ill that she
fainted under the heat of my room. Why should we not do her justice?
We know that she was innocent of any intention to wrong me; we know
that she was not aware of my engagement--'
Henry lifted his hand impatiently, and stopped her. 'There is such a
thing as being too just and too forgiving!' he interposed. 'I can't
bear to hear you talk in that patient way, after the scandalously cruel
manner in which you have been treated. Try to forget them both, Agnes.
I wish to God I could help you to do it!'
Agnes laid her hand on his arm. 'You are very good to me, Henry; but
you don't quite understand me. I was thinking of myself and my trouble
in quite a different way, when you came in. I was wondering whether
anything which has so entirely filled my heart, and so absorbed all
that is best and truest in me, as my feeling for your brother, can
really pass away as if it had never existed. I have destroyed the last
visible things that remind me of him. In this world I shall see him no
more. But is the tie that once bound us, completely broken? Am I as
entirely parted from the good and evil fortune of his life as if we had
never met and never loved? What do you think, Henry? I can hardly
believe it.'
'If you could bring the retribution on him that he has deserved,' Henry
Westwick answered sternly, 'I might be inclined to agree with you
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