The reader, perhaps, will hardly have believed in Lady Ongar's friendship; will, perhaps, have believed neither the friendship nor the story.

If so, the reader will have done her wrong, and will not have read her character aright.

The woman was not heartless because she had once, in one great epoch of her life, betrayed her own heart; nor was she altogether false because she had once lied; nor altogether vile, because she had once taught herself that, for such an one as her, riches were a necessity.

It might be that the punishment of her sin could meet with no remission in this world, but not on that account should it be presumed that there was no place for repentance left to her.
As she walked alone through the shrubberies at Ongar Park she thought much of those other paths at Clavering, and of the walks in which she had not been alone; and she thought of that interview in the garden when she had explained to Harry--as she had then thought so successfully--that they two, each being poor, were not fit to love and marry each other.

She had brooded over all that, too, during the long hours of her sad journey home to England.