“The tent?” said Lady Frogmore, with a bewildered look. “I am not thinking of any tent. It is that the place is strange. I can’t look him in the face, Agnes. Look! don’t you think he is changed? He seems to reproach me.” She held the miniature out to her sister. “And I don’t know what for,” she cried, weeping. “If I knew what it was for I could do better. But I can’t tell, I can’t tell.” After a minute she dried her eyes and looked at her sister again with a faint smile. “Don’t look so frightened, Agnes, as if you thought I was—silly, or something. No, I know it’s only a picture. I don’t mean the miniature has changed; but when I see his face in my heart he always seems to reproach me. What have I done? Oh, if I only knew what I had done!”
“Dear Mary,” said Agnes, “don’t trouble your mind with imaginations. It is all fancy. Do you think Frogmore, who was so fond of you, would trouble your poor innocent soul with a reproach? Oh no, oh no.”
“I think so, too,” said Mary, “but sometimes there comes a terror over me as if I have neglected something or forgotten something. If he sees us, Agnes, he must know I never meant it! He must know I never meant it! People can’t grow less understanding but more understanding when they die.”
“Surely,” said Agnes, “don’t you remember, dear, in ‘In Memoriam’—with larger, other eyes than ours?”
“It must be so,” said Mary, holding her sister’s hand. “But I have such a dreadful feeling as if I had done something wrong.”
“No, no, my dear; no, my poor dear.”
“If I have it has been in ignorance, Agnes. I have never intended— Look,” she said, suddenly turning to the table at the bedside, “do these old things belong to me?”
Poor Agnes took this change of subject for a sign of still further derangement of her sister’s troubled thoughts. She gave a slight glance at the little common-place boxes. “Oh, my dear, don’t think of such trifling things,” she said.
“Agnes, look. Do they belong to me?”
“These boxes? yes. I think so—they used to hold your work. They used to——” Then Agnes paused, for she suddenly remembered where the larger of the two, an Indian box in sandal wood, inlaid with ivory and silver, had always stood, and the last use that had been made of it. “They are not of any consequence. They can’t have anything to do with what we are speaking of,” she said.