Consider me for the
future, if you please, as an Obstacle removed. May you be happy!" Miss
Garth's lips closed on that last sentence like a trap, and Miss Garth's
eyes looked ominously prophetic into the matrimonial future.
If Magdalen's anxieties had not been far too serious to allow her the
customary free use of her tongue, she would have been ready on the
instant with an appropriately satirical answer. As it was, Miss Garth
simply irritated her. "Pooh!" she said--and ran upstairs to her sister's
room.
She knocked at the door, and there was no answer. She tried the door,
and it resisted her from the inside. The sullen, unmanageable Norah was
locked in.
Under other circumstances, Magdalen would not have been satisfied with
knocking--she would have called through the door loudly and more loudly,
till the house was disturbed and she had carried her point. But the
doubts and fears of the morning had unnerved her already. She went
downstairs again softly, and took her hat from the stand in the hall.
"He told me to put my hat on," she said to herself, with a meek filial
docility which was totally out of her character.
She went into the garden, on the shrubbery side; and waited there to
catch the first sight of her father on his return.
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