She felt that it should now be her duty to lead him back to her. So soon as the poignancy of his reflection that he was for ever separated from his brother had become less, he would turn to her for comfort, and he would be comforted. The memory of their old love would come back to him, and all the happiness to which she had looked forward for both of them would be theirs. Would it not be possible for them to gather up the fragments of their shattered love as she had gathered up the fragments of the picture she had broken?
Alas, the question which she asked herself failed to bring her happiness; for she knew that no hand could piece together the broken ivory which she had hidden away in her drawer; and still her heart kept moaning:
“Dead love lives nevermore;
No, not in heaven!”
The next morning her maid brought her among her letters one in a strange handwriting. It was signed “Clare Tristram.”
The name brought back to her long-distant memories of the girl bearing this name, who was to have married Agnes's uncle—her mother's brother, but who on the eve of the wedding, had fled with another man.
She recalled some of the incidents of the story, the most important being that she had been deprived of the privilege of wearing her bridesmaid's dress. She recollected that this had been a great grief to her; she had been about eleven years of age when that disappointment overtook her, and now she could not help recalling how, when she had been told by her mother that Clare Tristram had gone away to marry some one else, she had obligingly offered to wear the dress upon the occasion of Miss Tristram's wedding to somebody else, for she thought it would be a great pity that so lovely a dress should be locked up in a drawer.
The letter which she now found before her was not from this Clare Tristram, but from her daughter. Still it was signed Clare Tristram, and this fact set her thinking. She had never heard the name of the man whom the girl had actually married, and she had certainly never heard that the man was any relation to Clare Tristram.
“Dear Madam,—I write to you in great doubt and some fear,” the letter ran. “My mother, who died only two months ago at Cairo, where we have lived for several years, told me, a few days before the end came to her long illness, that I had no relations in the world, and no friends to whom she could entrust me after she was gone; but that she felt that you would accept the charge, if only to save me from her fate. These were the exact words of my dear mother, and I repeat them to you, because I think they may constitute some claim upon your pity, and I feel that I have only your pity to appeal to.
“My mother told me how she had done a cruel wrong to your mother's brother; but that act brought with it such a punishment as few women are called on to bear. The one for whom she forsook the noblest man in the world showed himself within a year of her marriage to be so bad that when he deserted her, she would not let me bear his name. She would not even let me know what that name was.