Miss Danton left the room. Grace sat down again, and looked at the locket curiously.
"I should like to open that and see whose picture it contains, and yet—"
She looked a little ashamed, and drew back the hand that touched it. But curiosity—woman's intensest passion—was not to be resisted.
"What harm can it be?" she thought. "She will never know."
She lifted the locket, lightly touched the spring, and it flew open. It contained more than a picture, although there was a picture of a handsome, boyish face that somehow had to Grace a familiar look. A slip of folded paper, a plain gold ring, and a tress of brown, curly hair dropped out. Grace opened the little slip of paper, and read it with an utterly confounded face. It was partly written and partly printed, and was the marriage certificate of Agnes Grant and Henry Darling. It bore date New York, two years before.
Grace dropped the paper astounded. Miss Agnes Darling was a married woman, then, and, childish as she looked, had been so for two years. What were her reasons for denying it, and where was Henry Darling—dead or deserted?
She look at the pictured face again. Very good-looking, but very youthful and irresolute. Whom had she ever seen that looked like that? Some one, surely, for it was as familiar as her own in the glass; but who, or where, or when, was all densest mystery.
There was an uneasy movement of the sleeper. Grace, feeling guilty, put back hastily the tress of hair—his, no doubt—the ring—a wedding-ring, of course—and the marriage certificate. She closed the locket, and laid it back on the fluttering heart. Poor little pale Agnes! that great trouble of woman's life, loving and losing, had come to her then already.
In the cold, gray dawn of the early morning, Grace resigned her office to Babette, the housemaid, and sought her room. Agnes Darling still slept—the merciful sleep Doctor Frank's opiate had given her.