"How, dear my Lady?"
The white-faced girl lifted her head, and let her eyes meet those of Agnes.
"It were to no good to speak in riddles," she said. "Agnes, you have dwelt in this house a full year, and you know the sorrows thereof as well as I. Specially, you know my sorrows—you know that I live a life wherein there is nothing to make the present happy, and the future is all full of a great dread. There is only one in all the world that loves me, and I cannot go to him: and one that I love not, and that loves not me, is about to be forced upon me whether I will or no. Why should I try to hide these things from you? You know them all. In all the whole world that is, and in the life that is to be, there is not one ray of sunlight for me. Do you marvel, Agnes, if life looks black to mine eyes? Are you one of those surface seers, that reckon a woman should be comforted for a breaking heart by a necklace of pearl, and that she is a fool to weep for a lost friend if she have a new gown of crimson velvet?"
"No, indeed, Lady mine."
"Aye me!" sighed the Lady Anne. "If I had but been a carpenter's child, or of a gardener——that I could have welcomed him back at eve from his daily work, and kept his hearth bright, and might have loved and been loved! I could have done without the pearls and the velvet, Agnes. But I have them: and they be poor exchange for the other."
"Things will change one of these days, sweet my Lady. ''Tis a long lane has no turning.'"
"It has been a long one, and there be eight years now since it turned last. Eight years, Agnes—more than half my life! And folks think it strange that I care. They looked for me, it should seem, to set mine heart on gewgaws, and to think more of the bidding to a dance than of the loss of a father. If I could see an end to it, I might take less thought. But I can behold no turn coming save one, and that is for the worser."
Agnes knew that this allusion was to her approaching marriage. Certainly that was no source of congratulation. In the eyes of the waiting-woman no less than the mistress, the handsome young Baron of Groby, Thomas Grey, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth, who had been chosen as the future husband of the Lady Anne de Holand, was not a man to be regarded with any other sentiment than repugnance. Agnes had seen him kick his dog out of the way, and never look whether he had hurt it, when the poor little spaniel, unaware of its master's mood, had presumed to request his attention when he was not disposed to give it.
"There is only one comfort thereanent. I shall, may-be, never live to be wedded."
"Dear my Lady, pray you"——