“Where’s that little bit of a ring I bought for you?”
She had anticipated this, and took from her pocket a plain gold ring, kept until that day where no one could find it, and holding it up, she said:
“Here it is. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, yes;” and his lips began to quiver with a grieved, injured expression. “He could give you diamonds, and I couldn’t. That’s why you left me, wasn’t it, Sarah—why you wrote that letter which made my head into two? It’s ached so ever since, and I’ve missed you so much. They put me in a cell where crazy people were—oh! so many—and they said that I was mad, when I was only wanting you. I’m not mad now, am I, darling?”
His arm was round her neck, and he drew her down until his lips touched hers. And Agnes suffered it. She could not return the kiss, but she did not turn away from him, and she let him caress her hair, and wind it around his fingers, whispering:
“This is like Sarah’s, and you are Sarah, are you not?”
“Yes, I am Sarah,” she answered, while the smile so painful to see again broke over his face as he told how much he had missed her, and asked, “if she had not come to stay till he died.”
“There’s something wrong,” he said; “somebody is dead, and it seems as if somebody else wanted to die—as if Maddy died ever since the Lord Governor went away. Do you know Governor Guy?”
“I am his step-mother,” Agnes replied, whereupon Uncle Joseph laughed so long and loud that Maddy woke, and, alarmed by the noise, came down to see what was the matter.
Agnes did not hear her, and as she reached the doorway, she started at the strange position of the parties—Uncle Joseph still smoothing the curls which drooped over him, and Agnes saying to him: