more than half an hour afterwards, sadly anxious,
as you may well believe, on Magdalen's account

"At the end of the half-hour, or more, I came
down stairs. As I reached the landing, I
suddenly heard her voice, raised entreatingly, and
calling on him by his name—then loud sobs—
then a frightful laughing and screaming, both
together, that rang through the house. I
instantly ran into the room; and found Magdalen
on the sofa in violent hysterics, and Frank
standing staring at her, with a lowering angry
face, biting his nails.

"I felt so indignant—without knowing plainly
why, for I was ignorant of course of what had
passed at the interview—that I took Mr. Francis
Clare by the shoulders, and pushed him out of
the room. I am careful to tell you how I acted
towards him, and what led to it; because I
understand that he is excessively offended with
me, and that he is likely to mention elsewhere,
what he calls, my unladylike violence towards
him. If he should mention it to you, I am
anxious to acknowledge, of my own accord, that
I forgot myself—not, I hope you will think,
without some provocation.

"I pushed him into the hall, leaving
Magdalen, for the moment, to Miss Garth's care.
Instead of going away, he sat down sulkily on
one of the hall-chairs. 'May I ask the reason
of this extraordinary violence?' he inquired,
with an injured look. ' No,' I said. 'You will
be good enough to imagine the reason for yourself,
and to leave us immediately, if you please.'
He sat doggedly in the chair, biting his nails, and
considering. ' What have I done, to be treated
in this unfeeling manner?' he asked, after a
while. 'I can enter into no discussion with
you,' I answered; ' I can only request you to
leave us. If you persist in waiting to see my
sister again, I will go to the cottage myself, and
appeal to your father.'  He got up in a great
hurry at those words. 'I have been infamously
used in this business,' he said. 'All the
hardships and the sacrifices have fallen to my share.
I'm the only one among you who has any heart:
all the rest are as hard as stones—Magdalen
included. In one breath she says she loves me,
and in another, she tells me to go to China.
What have I done to be treated with this heartless
inconsistency? I'm consistent myself — I
only want to stop at home—and (what's the
consequence?) you're all against me!'  In that
manner, he grumbled his way down the steps,
and so I saw the last of him. This was all that
passed between us. If he gives you any other
account of it, what he says will be false. He
made no attempt to return. An hour afterwards,
his father came alone to say good-by. He saw
Miss Garth and me, but not Magdalen; and he
told us he would take the necessary measures,
with your assistance, for having his son properly
looked after in London, and seen safely on
board the vessel when the time came. It was
a short visit, and a sad leave-taking. Even
Mr. Clare was sorry, though he tried hard to
hide it.

"We had barely two hours, after Mr. Clare
had left us before it would be time to go. I
went back to Magdalen, and found her quieter
and better; though terribly pale and exhausted,
and oppressed, as I fancied, by thoughts which
she could not prevail on herself to communicate.
She would tell me nothing then—she has told
me nothing since—of what passed between
herself and Francis Clare. When I spoke of him
angrily (feeling as I did that he had distressed
and tortured her, when she ought to have had
all the encouragement and comfort from him that
man could give), she refused to hear me: she
made the kindest allowances, and the sweetest
excuses for him; and laid all the blame of the
dreadful state in which I had found her, entirely
on herself. Was I wrong in telling you that
she had a noble nature? And won't you alter
your opinion when you read these lines?

"We had no friends to come and bid us good-
by; and our few acquaintances were too far from
us—perhaps too indifferent about us—to call.
We employed the little leisure left, in going over
the house together for the last time. We took
leave of our old schoolroom, our bedrooms, the
room where our mother died, the little study
where our father used to settle his accounts and
write his letters—feeling towards them, in our
forlorn situation, as other girls might have felt
at parting with old friends. From the house,
in a gleam of fine weather, we went into the
garden, and gathered our last nosegay; with
the purpose of drying the flowers when they
begin to wither, and keeping them in
remembrance of the happy days that are gone. When
we had said good-by to the garden, there was
only half an hour left. We went together to
the grave; we knelt down, side by side, in
silence, and kissed the sacred ground. I
thought my heart would have broken. August
was the month of my mother's birthday; and,
this time last year, my father and Magdalen and
I were all three consulting in secret what
present we could make to surprise her with on
the birthday morning.

"If you had seen how Magdalen suffered,
you would never doubt her again. I had to
take her from the last resting-place of our
father and mother, almost by force. Before we
were out of the churchyard, she broke from
me, and ran back. She dropped on her knees
at the grave; tore up from it passionately a
handful of grass; and said something to herself,
at the same moment, which, though I followed
her instantly, I did not get near enough to hear.
She turned on me in such a frenzied manner,
when I tried to raise her from the ground—
she looked at me with such a fearful wildness in
her eyes—that I felt absolutely terrified at the
sight of her. To my relief, the paroxysm left
her as suddenly as it had come. She thrust
away the tuft of grass into the bosom of her
dress, and took my arm, and hurried with me
out of the churchyard. I asked her why she
had gone back—I asked what those words were,
which she had spoken at the grave. ' A
promise to our dead father,' she answered, with
a momentary return of the wild look and the