Through One Administration

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

She paused abruptly, and Agnes felt that she did so to place a check upon herself; she had seen her do it before. When she spoke again it was in an entirely different tone, and the remaining half-hour of her visit was spent in the discussion of every-day subjects. Agnes listened, and replied to her with a sense of actual anguish. She could have borne better to have seen her less self-controlled; or she fancied so, at least. The summer had made an alteration in her, which it was almost impossible to describe. Every moment revealed some new, sad change in her, and yet she sat and talked commonplaces, and was bright, and witty, and epigrammatic until the last.

"When we get our bill through," she said, with a little smile, just before her departure, "I am to go abroad for a year,—for two, for three, if I wish. I think that is the bribe which has been offered me. One must always be bribed, you know."

As she stood at the window watching the carriage drive away, Agnes was conscious of a depression which was very hard to bear. The brightness of her own atmosphere seemed to have become heavy,—the sun hid itself behind the drifting, wintry clouds,—she glanced around her room with a sense of dreariness. Something carried her back to the memories which were the one burden of her present life.

"Such grief cannot enter a room and not leave its shadow behind it," she said. And she put her hand against the window-side, and leaned her brow upon it sadly. It was curious, she thought, the moment after, that the mere sight of a familiar figure should bring such a sense of comfort with it as did the sight of the one she saw approaching. It was that of Laurence Arbuthnot, who came with a business communication for Mrs. Merriam, having been enabled, by chance, to leave his work for an hour. He held a roll of music in one hand and a bunch of violets in the other, and when he entered the room was accompanied by the fresh fragrance of the latter offering.

Agnes made a swift involuntary movement toward him.

"Ah!" she said, "I could scarcely believe that it was you."

He detected the emotion in her manner and tone at once.

"Something has disturbed you," he said. "What is it?"

"I have seen Bertha," she answered, and the words had a sound of appeal in them, which she herself no more realized or understood than she comprehended the impulse which impelled her to speak.