speak, was as far from her as ever. Ere long the thickening conflict of her thoughts forced its way outward for relief, in words and actions. She raised her head and beat her hand helplessly on the table.
'God help me, what am I to do?' she broke out. 'How am I to tell them?'
'There is no need to tell them,' said a voice behind her. 'They know it already.'
She started to her feet and looked round. It was Magdalen who stood before her—Magdalen who had spoken those words.
Yes, there was the graceful figure, in its mourning garments, standing out tall and black and motionless against the leafy background. There was Magdalen herself, with a changeless stillness on her white face; with an icy resignation in her steady gray eyes.
'We know it already,' she repeated, in clear, measured tones. 'Mr. Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children; and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle's mercy.'
So, without a tear on her cheeks, without a faltering tone in her voice, she repeated the lawyer's own words, exactly as he had spoken them. Miss Garth staggered back a step and caught at the bench to support herself. Her head swam; she closed her eyes in a momentary faintness. When they opened again, Magdalen's arm was supporting her, Magdalen's breath fanned her cheek, Magdalen's cold lips kissed her. She drew back from the kiss; the touch of the girl's lips thrilled her with terror.
As soon as she could speak she put the inevitable question. 'You heard us,' she said. 'Where?'
'Under the open window.'
'All the time?'
'From beginning to end.'
She had listened—this girl of eighteen, in the first week of her orphanage, had listened to the whole terrible revelation, word by word, as it fell from the lawyer's lips; and had never once betrayed herself! From first to last, the only movements which had escaped her had been movements guarded enough and slight enough to be mistaken for the passage of the summer breeze through the leaves!
'Don't try to speak yet,' she said, in softer and gentler tones. 'Don't look at me with those doubting eyes. What wrong have I done? When Mr. Pendril wished to speak to you about Norah and me, his letter gave us our choice to be present at the interview, or to keep away. If my elder sister decided to keep away, how could I come? How could I hear my own story except as I did? My listening has done no harm. It has done good—it has saved you the distress of speaking to us. You have suffered enough for us already; it is time we learned to suffer for ourselves. I have learned. And Norah is learning.'
'Norah!'
'Yes. I have done all I could to spare you. I have told Norah.'
She had told Norah! Was this girl, whose courage had faced the terrible necessity from which a woman old enough to be her mother had recoiled, the girl Miss Garth had brought up? the girl whose nature she had believed to be as well known to her as her own?
'Magdalen!' she cried out, passionately, 'you frighten me!'
Magdalen only sighed, and turned wearily away.
'Try not to think worse of me than I deserve,' she said. 'I can't cry. My heart is numbed.'
She moved away slowly over the grass. Miss Garth watched the tall black figure gliding away alone until it was lost among the trees. While it was in sight she could think of nothing else. The moment it was gone, she thought of Norah. For the first time in her experience of the sisters her heart led her instinctively to the elder of the two.
Norah was still in her own room. She was sitting on the couch by the window, with her mother's old music- book—the keepsake which Mrs. Vanstone had found in her husband's study on the day of her husband's death— spread open on her lap. She looked up from it with such quiet sorrow, and pointed with such ready kindness to the vacant place at her side, that Miss Garth doubted for the moment whether Magdalen had spoken the truth. 'See,' said Norah, simply, turning to the first leaf in the music-book—'my mother's name written in it, and some verses to my father on the next page. We may keep this for ourselves, if we keep nothing else.' She put her arm round Miss Garth's neck, and a faint tinge of color stole over her cheeks. 'I see anxious thoughts in your face,' she whispered. 'Are you anxious about me? Are you doubting whether I have heard it? I have heard the whole truth. I might have felt it bitterly, later; it is too soon to feel it now. You have seen Magdalen? She went out to find you—where did you leave her?'
'In the garden. I couldn't speak to her; I couldn't look at her. Magdalen has frightened me.'
Norah rose hurriedly; rose, startled and distressed by Miss Garth's reply.
'Don't think ill of Magdalen,' she said. 'Magdalen suffers in secret more than I do. Try not to grieve over what you have heard about us this morning. Does it matter who we are, or what we keep or lose? What loss is there for us after the loss of our father and mother? Oh, Miss Garth,
'Magdalen was always your favorite.'
Tenderly as they had been spoken, those words fell reproachfully on Miss Garth's ear. For the first time in the long companionship of her pupils and herself a doubt whether she, and all those about her, had not been fatally mistaken in their relative estimate of the sisters, now forced itself on her mind.
She had studied the natures of her two pupils in the daily intimacy of twelve years. Those natures, which she believed herself to have sounded through all their depths, had been suddenly tried in the sharp ordeal of affliction. How had they come out from the test? As her previous experience had prepared her to see them? No: in flat contradiction to it.
What did such a result as this imply?
