Hardly knowing what she did, Agatha sprang past the threshold and tottered a few steps on. Then turning, she saw the door shut behind her, slowly, noiselessly, but it was shut. She felt as if the door of hope had been shut upon her heart.
She turned again, and fled away.
CHAPTER XVIII.
It was late afternoon. The rain had ceased, and glowed into one of those soft October days, so exquisitely sunny and fair. The light glimmered through the closed Venetian blinds of “Anne's room,” and danced on the carpet and about Agatha's feet as she sat, quiet at last, and tried to remember how she had come and how long she had been there. She had seen no one; nobody ever came into “Anne's room.”
The dressing-bell rang—the only sound she had heard in the house for hours.
She started up, waking to the frightful certainty that all was real—that the ways of the household were going on just as usual—that she must rouse up, no matter staggering under what burden of misery, and go through her daily part, as if nothing had happened, and nothing was about to happen.
Nothing? when this day, perhaps this same hour, must decide one of two things—whether she were a wretched wife, bound for life to a man who married her solely for mercenary motives, or whether she were a wife—perhaps in this even more wretched—who had so wronged and insulted her husband that nothing ever could win his forgiveness or restore his love. His love, which, as she now dimly began to see, and shuddered in the seeing, was becoming to her the most precious thing in existence.
Never, until she sat there, quite alone, and feeling what it was to be left alone, after being so watched and cherished—-never until now had she understood what the world would be to her if doomed to question her husband's honour or to outlive her husband's love.
“It must have been all a dream,” she said, moving her cold fingers to and fro over her forehead. “He never could have wronged me so, or I him. He must surely explain, and I will ask his pardon for what I said in my passion—Unless, indeed, my accusation were true.”