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 colour 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, there is the only
bitterness! What did we remember of them,
when we laid them in the grave yesterday?
Nothing but the love they gave us—the love
we must never hope for again. 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 favourite: I want
her to be your favourite still." She laid the
music-book gently on Miss Garth's lap—and
left the room.

"Magdalen was always your favourite."

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?

Thoughts came to her, as she asked herself
that question, which have startled and saddened
us all.

Does there exist in every human being,
beneath that outward and visible character which
is shaped into form by the social influences
surrounding us, an inward, invisible disposition,
which is part of ourselves; which education
may indirectly modify, but can never hope to
change? Is the philosophy which denies this,
and asserts that we are born with dispositions
like blank sheets of paper, a philosophy which
has failed to remark that we are not born with
blank faces—a philosophy which has never
compared together two infants of a few days
old, and has never observed that those infants
are not born with blank tempers for mothers
and nurses to fill up at will? Are there,
infinitely varying with each individual, inbred forces
of Good and Evil in all of us, deep down below
the reach of mortal encouragement and mortal
repression—hidden Good and hidden Evil, both
alike at the mercy of the liberating opportunity
and the sufficient temptation? Within these
earthly limits, is earthly Circumstance ever the
key; and can no human vigilance warn us
beforehand of the forces imprisoned in ourselves
which that key may unlock?

For the first time, thoughts such as these rose
darkly—as shadowy and terrible possibilities—
in Miss Garth's mind. For the first time, she
associated those possibilities with the past
conduct and characters, with the future lives and
fortunes of the orphan-sisters.

Searching, as in a glass, darkly, into the two
natures, she felt her way, doubt by doubt, from
one possible truth to another. It might be, that
the upper surface of their characters was all that
she had, thus far, plainly seen in Norah and
Magdalen. It might be, that the unalluring
secresy and reserve of one sister, the all-attractive
openness and high spirits of the other,
were more or less referable, in each case, to
those physical causes which work towards the
production of moral results. It might be, that
under the surface so formed—a surface which