"If I were to lose him now, I should be no poorer than I was then," she thought; and then, after a moment's reflection, "O yes, yes, a thousand times poorer, once having had him."
She walked a little way down the street, and then came back again and lingered under those two-windows, with an unspeakable yearning to cast herself upon her friend in this hour of shipwreck. She had such bitter need of sympathy from some one nearer her own level than the poor honest faithful Yorkshire girl.
"She was once my friend," she said to herself, still hovering there irresolute, "and seemed very fond of me. She could advise me, knowing the world so well as she does; and I do not think she would betray me. She owes me something, too. But for my promise to her, I might have been George Fairfax's wife, and all this trouble might have been avoided."
George Fairfax's wife! What a strange dreamlike fancy it seemed! And yet it might have been; it had needed only one little word from herself to make the dream a fact.
"I tried to do my duty," she thought, "and yet ruin and sorrow have come upon me." And then the small still voice whispered, "Tried to do your duty, but not always; sometimes you left off trying, and dared to be happy in your own way. Between the two roads of vice and virtue, you tried to make a devious pathway of your own, not wholly on one side or the other."
Once having seen that light, feeling somehow that there was sympathy and comfort near, she could not go away without making some attempt to see her friend. She thought with a remorseful pang of times and seasons during her wedded life when Laura Armstrong's too solicitous friendship had seemed to her something of a bore. How different was it with her now!
She summoned up resolution at last, and in a half desperate mood, went round to the front door and knocked—a tremulous conscience-stricken knock, as of some milliner's apprentice bringing home a delayed bonnet. The man who opened the door looked involuntarily for her basket.
"What is it?" he asked dubiously, scenting a begging-letter writer in the tall slim figure and closely-veiled face, and being on principle averse from gentility that did not ride in its carriage. "What is it, young woman?"
"Can I see Lady Laura Armstrong? I want to see her very particularly."
"Have you got an appointment?"