condemnation. She had given him the opportunity of demonstrating their falsehood. He had failed to do so to her satisfaction, and thereupon she had told him, as she now told Agnes, that the engagement between them was at an end.
The girl's first feeling was one of burning indignation against the persons who had dared to slander her lover. She knew little of what had been said, she understood less, but she was sure, she was convinced, before hearing anything, that it was all untrue.
"Pedvinn talks of bringing an action against Thoumes and his wife," Mrs. Le Messurier told her, "for misappropriating poor Louis Renouf's property."
"But not against Jack, I suppose, because he could not keep the poor old man alive!" Agnes cried, with flaming cheeks. Renouf was a patient of Owen's, who had died about three weeks before.
"The girl Margot has been seen going in and out of the surgery ever since your engagement, child."
"And suppose she has," cried Agnes, astonished, "what harm is there in that?"
But when her first anger had cooled down she awoke to a sense of her own misery, the cruelty of her fate. She had not been engaged three months, and already the beautiful dream which had come into her life was shattered at a touch. Until the unforgettable moment when Owen had first called at Mon Désir, she had led such dull, such monotonous days; not unhappy ones, simply because she had known no happier ones to gauge them by. She had often smiled since to remember that she had been used to find excitement in a summer picnic with the De Souchy girls at Rocquaine, in a winter lecture with magic-lantern illustrations at the Town Library.
In those days she had known of love in much the same vagueunrealising
