"Indeed I do. She has quite a genius for dressmaking. The girls showed me some of her masterpieces when I was at your home."
"And do you mean to say that you do not recognise this gown?" I asked.
"No, how should I?" She came nearer, and looked closely at it. Then her face changed. "Why, it is—never! Yes, it is my pink ball-dress! Oh, Nan, I wish you had not told me! Why did you remind me of that night?"
She threw up her hands with a tragic, despairful gesture, and I saw she was struggling with strong emotion.
"Oh, Agneta, what about it? What is it that makes you so unhappy? Tell me about that night."
"Indeed, I am unhappy—never anything but unhappy now," said Agneta with tears, and the whole story came out.
It seemed that she had last worn this frock at a ball, where she met Ralph Marshman, and said farewell to him. He was a junior clerk in a bank, and Mr. Redmayne had been indignant at his presumption in thinking to wed his daughter. He had forbidden him to address Agneta again, and, in order to make obedience easy, had used his influence to get the young man removed from the Manchester bank to a branch bank at Newcastle.
In spite of every precaution, however, the two had managed to secure a few minutes' quiet talk at this ball on the night prior to Marshman's departure for Newcastle. They had vowed to be faithful to one another, and to meet, in spite of Mr. Redmayne's prohibition, whenever opportunity offered. They had even arranged to carry on a secret correspondence; but, through the treachery, as Agneta described it, of a servant whom she had bribed to secrete her letters, one of them had fallen into her mother's hands. A painful scene ensued, and her mother, after extorting from her a promise that she would not write to Marshman again, had finally arranged to send her to "Gay Bowers." And now, at a distance from her lover, and fearful, in spite of her protestations that she would never give him up, lest her parents should succeed in finally separating her from him, Agneta was in a miserable frame of mind.
I pitied her greatly as she opened her heart to me, and yet I listened with a sense of revulsion. There seemed to me something ignoble and degrading in the way this courtship had been conducted. It hurt me to think that my cousin could stoop to practise such dissimulation, and I found it hard to believe that the man could be worthy of a woman's love who wooed her in this clandestine fashion. The beautiful crown of love was tarnished and defiled by being thus dragged in the dust.
I was shocked, too, by the way Agneta spoke of her parents. She seemed to regard them as her natural enemies. It was clear to me that the atmosphere of her home must be very different from that of ours. We girls had no secrets from our mother. Our parents were not afraid to trust us, nor we to trust them.