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Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889

"No Name"

What else can we remember to-day?
What change can the world, and the world's cruel laws make in _our_
memory of the kindest father, the kindest mother, that children ever
had!" She stopped: struggled with her rising grief; and quietly,
resolutely, kept it down. "Will you wait here," she said, "while I go
and bring Magdalen back? Magdalen was always your favorite: I want
her to be your favorite still." She laid the music-book gently on Miss
Garth's lap--and left the room.
"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.


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