The memory of her own dead love stung Kate to the very soul.
"Oh!" she said, bitterly, "it is only a very old story, after all. We are all alike; we give up our whole heart for a man's smile, and, verily, we get our reward. This husband of yours took a fancy, I suppose, to some new and fresher face, and threw you over for her sake?"
Agnes Darling looked up with wide black eyes.
"Oh, no, no! He loved me faithfully. He never was false, as you think. It was not that; he thought I was false, and base, and wicked. Oh!" she cried, covering her lace with her hands again; "I can't tell you how base he thought me."
"I think I understand," Kate said, slowly. "But how was it? It was not true, of course."
Agnes lifted her face, raised her solemn, dark eyes mournfully to the gaze of the earnest blue ones.
"It was not true," she replied simply; "I loved him with all my heart, and him only. He was all the world to me, for I was alone, an orphan, sisterless and brotherless. I had only one relative in the wide world—a distant cousin, a young man, who boarded in the same house with me. I was only a poor working-girl of New York, and my husband was far above me—I thought so then, know it since. I knew very little of him. He boarded in the same house, and I only saw him at the table. How he ever came to love me—a little pale, quiet thing like me—I don't know; but he did love me—he did—it is very sweet to remember that now. He loved me, and he married me, but under an assumed name, under the name of Darling, which I know now was not his real one."
She paused a little, and Kate looked at her with sudden breathless interest. How like this story was to another, terribly familiar.
"We were married," Agnes went on, softly and sadly, "and I was happy. Oh, Miss Danton, I can never tell you how unspeakably happy I was for a time. But it was not for long. Troubles began to gather thick and fast before many months. My husband was a gambler"—she paused a second or two at Miss Danton's violent start—"and got into his old habits of staying out very late at night, and often, when he had lost money, coming home moody and miserable. I had no influence over him to stop him. He had a friend, another gambler, and a very bad man, who drew him on. It was very dreary sitting alone night after night until twelve or one o'clock, and my only visitor was my cousin, the young man I told you of. He was in love, and clandestinely engaged to a young lady, whose family were wealthy and would not for a moment hear of the match. I was his only confidante, and he liked to come in evenings and talk to me of Helen. Sometimes, seeing me so lonely and low-spirited, he would stay with me within half an hour of Harry's return; but Heaven knows neither he nor I ever dreamed it could be wrong. No harm might ever have come of it, for my husband knew and liked him, but for that gambling companion, whose name was Furniss."
She paused again, trembling and agitated, for Miss Danton had uttered a sharp, involuntary exclamation.