“But no one knows, not even you,” he returned, “how much she has done, how much she has undergone, how hard she has striven. Dear Agnes!”

She had put her hand entreatingly on his arm, to stop him; and was very, very pale.

“Well, well!” he said with a sigh, dismissing, as I then saw, some trial she had borne, or was yet to bear, in connection with what my aunt had told me. “Well! I have never told you, Trotwood, of her mother. Has any one?”

“Never, Sir.”

“It’s not much—though it was much to suffer. She married me in opposition to her father’s wish, and he renounced her. She prayed him to forgive her, before my Agnes came into this world. He was a very hard man, and her mother had long been dead. He repulsed her. He broke her heart.”

Agnes leaned upon his shoulder, and stole her arm about his neck.

“She had an affectionate and gentle heart,” he said; “and it was broken. I knew its tender nature very well. No one could, if I did not. She loved me dearly, but was never happy. She was always labouring, in secret, under this distress; and being delicate and downcast at the time of his last repulse—for it was not the first, by many—pined away and died. She left me Agnes, two weeks old; and the gray hair that you recollect me with, when you first came.”

He kissed Agnes on her cheek.

“My love for my dear child was a diseased love, but my mind was all unhealthy then. I say no more of that. I am not speaking of myself, Trotwood, but of her mother, and of her. If I give you any clue to what I am, or to what I have been, you will unravel it, I know. What Agnes is, I need not say. I have always read something of her poor mother’s story in her character; and so I tell it you to-night, when we three are again together, after such great changes. I have told it all.”

His bowed head, and her angel face and filial duty, derived a more pathetic meaning from it than they had had before. If I had wanted anything by which to mark this night of our reunion, I should have found it in this.

Agnes rose up from her father’s side, before long; and going softly to her piano, played some of the old airs to which we had often listened in that place.

“Have you any intention of going away again?” Agnes asked me, as I was standing by.

“What does my sister say to that?”

“I hope not.”

“Then I have no such intention, Agnes.”

“I think you ought not, Trotwood, since you ask me,” she said, mildly. “Your growing reputation and success enlarge your power of doing good; and if I could spare my brother,” with her eyes upon me, “perhaps the time could not.”

“What I am, you have made me, Agnes. You should know best.”

“I made you, Trotwood?”