Years before a pet dog of Howard's had become old and sickly and Agatha's father had decided it must be killed. He had attempted to shoot the animal in its sleep, but his nervousness had caused him to miss his aim. It had taken three shots to finish the business. Agatha had come upon the scene just in time to see the look the dying brute turned on its idolized master, and the incident had stamped itself on her memory as the supreme tragedy in her experience. She invariably dreamed of it when feverish and ill. This night she underwent the familiar agony with a difference. In the grotesque necromancy of the dream-world, the wounded dog had become Forbes, turning his stricken gaze upon the friend who had done him to death. She woke in a cold sweat and did not sleep again.
At four o'clock she was up and cleaning house as the one adequate antidote for the remorseful thoughts that threatened to wreck her reason. She worked furiously all the morning, barely stopping to eat. Miss Finch watched her from a distance, heart-wrung and afraid, but knowing from experience that at certain crises Agatha was best left to herself. Howard, with the characteristic masculine reluctance to witness suffering out of his power to relieve, took his fishing rod and departed for a day of his favorite sport.
About two o'clock in the afternoon, Ridgeley Warren came strolling up the driveway between the rows of stately trees which made the battered old house at the end of the avenue appear an anti-climax, and so reached her unheralded. Agatha had thrown a braided rug across the clothes-line and was beating it as if she had a personal spite against each individual rag. The sun was full on her hair and despite her menial occupation, she seemed to him a splendid figure, furiously vital, crowned with light. Excitement whipped up his pulses as he left the driveway and walked across the grass in her direction, but when near enough to make his voice heard above the volley of blows, he only said nonchalantly, "Good afternoon, Hephzibah."
Agatha turned and stood panting. She had been working at high pressure since daybreak, and close inspection revealed not a masquerading goddess but a tired, bedraggled girl. Her hair had slipped from the restraining pins and a wayward coil partly extinguished one eye. Her fair skin was clouded by successive layers of dirt. A disfiguring smudge successfully effaced the dimple in her chin. With quickening admiration Warren realized that this soiled and disheveled apparition still had a distinct claim to beauty.
"Hard at work, I see, Hephzibah." He stood with his hands in his pockets, immaculate in his light summer clothing, and as always he roused her to defiance.
"My name is Kent. Please use it."
"I'm ready to call you anything you please, my dear spitfire. Only remember that it's not my fault that I've always thought of you as Hephzibah."
Agatha glared at him. His presence restored her poise. She realized that as an antidote Warren was better than a thousand years of house-cleaning.
"I don't know why you should think of me as Hephzibah or anything else. I don't know why you shouldn't dismiss me from your mind altogether as I should like to dismiss you."