Forgetting all other anxieties in the anxiety to cheer him, she gently
pressed the hand he gave her. "If _that_ won't tell him the truth," she
thought, "nothing will."
It failed to tell him the truth; but it forced a question on his mind
which he had not ventured to ask himself before. "Is it her gratitude,
or her love; that is speaking to me?" he wondered. "If I was only a
younger man, I might almost hope it was her love." That terrible sum in
subtraction which had first presented itself on the day when she told
him her age began to trouble him again as he left the house. He
took twenty from forty-one, at intervals, all the way back to the
ship-owners' office in Cornhill.
Left by herself, Magdalen approached the table to write the line of
answer which Miss Garth requested, and gratefully to accept the proposal
that had been made to her.
The second letter which she had laid aside and forgotten was the
first object that caught her eye on changing her place. She opened
it immediately, and, not recognizing the handwriting, looked at the
signature. To her unutterable astonishment, her correspondent proved to
be no less a person than--old Mr.
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