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.
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