 I hope Miss Vanston knows her part, whispered Mrs. Marable, anxiously addressing herself to Miss Garth in a corner of the theatre. If airs and graces make an actress, ma'am, Macdonald's performance will astonish us all. With that reply Miss Garth took out her work and seated herself on guard in the centre of the pit. The manager perched himself, book in hand, on a stool close in front of the stage. He was an active little man, of a sweet and cheerful temper, and he gave the signal to begin with his patient interest in the proceedings as if they had caused him no trouble in the past and promised him no difficulty in the future. The two characters, which opened the comedy of the rivals, Fag and The Coachman, appeared on the scene, looked many sizes too tall for their canvas background, which represented a street and bath, exhibited the customary inability to manage their own arms, legs and voices, went out severally at the wrong exits, and expressed their perfect approval of results so far by laughing heartily behind the scenes. "'Silence, gentlemen, if you please,' remonstrated the cheerful manager. As loud as you like on the stage, but the audience mustn't hear you off it. Miss Marible ready? Miss Venston ready? Easy there with the street and bath, it's going up crooked. Face this way, Miss Marible, full face, if you please. Miss Venston?' He checked himself suddenly. "'Curious,' he said, under his breath. She fronts the audience of her own accord. Lucy opened the scene in these words. "'Indeed, ma'am, I traversed half the town in search of it. I don't believe there's a circulating library in bath I haven't been at.' The manager started in his chair. My heart alive! She speaks out without telling. The dialogue went on. Lucy produced the novels from his Lydia language as private reading from on her cloak. The manager rose excitably to his feet. Marvellous! No hurry with the books, no dropping them. She looked at the titles before she announced them to her mistress. She sat down, Humphrey Clinker, on The Tears of Sensibility, with a smart little smack which pointed the antithesis. One moment, and she announced Julia's visit. Another, and she dropped the brisk, waiting-maid's curtsy. A third, and she was off the stage, on the side, sat down for her in the book. The manager wheeled round on his tool, and looked hard at Miss Garth. "'I beg your pardon, ma'am,' he said. Miss Marvell told me before he began that this was the young lady's first attempt. It can't be, surely.' "'It is,' replied Miss Garth, reflecting the manager's look of amazement on her own face. "'Was it possible that Magdalene's unintelligible industry in the study of her part really sprang from a serious interest in her occupation, an interest which implied a natural fitness for it?' The rehearsal went on. The stout lady with the wig and the excellent heart personated the sentimental Julia from an inveterately tragic point of view, and used her handkerchief distractedly in the first scene. The spinster-relative felt Mrs Malaprop's mistake in language so seriously that took such extraordinary pains with her blunders that they sounded more like exercises in her locution than anything else. The unhappy lad who led the forlorn hope of the company in the person of Sir Anthony Absolute expressed the age and irresubility of his character by tottering incessantly at the knees and thumping the stage perpetually with his stick. Slowly and clumsily, with constant interruptions and interminable mistakes, the first act dragged on until Lucy appeared again to end it in soliloquy, with a confession of her assumed simplicity and the praise of her own cunning. Here the stage-artifice of the situation presented difficulties which MacBellan had not encountered in the first scene, and here her total want of experience led her into more than one palpable mistake. The stage-manager, with an eagerness which he had not shown in the case of any other member of the company, interfered immediately and set her right. At one point she was to pause and take a turn on the stage. She did it. At another she was to stop, toss her head, and look pertly at the audience. She did it. When she took out the paper to read the list of the presents she had received, could she give it a tap with her finger? Yes, and lead off with a little laugh. Yes, after twice trying. Could she read the different items with a sly look at the end of each sentence, straight at the pit? Yes, straight at the pit, and as sly as you please. The manager's cheerful face beamed with approval. He tucked the play under his arm and clapped his hands gaily. The gentlemen, clustered together behind the scenes, followed his example. The ladies looked at each other, with dawning doubts whether they had not better left the new recruit in the retirement of private life. Too deeply absorbed in the business of the stage to heed any of them, MacBellan asked Leave to repeat the soliloquy, and make quite sure of her own improvement. She went all through it again without a mistake this time, from beginning to end. The manager's celebrating her attention to his directions by an outpost of professional approbation, which escaped him in spite of himself. "'She can take a hint,' cried the little man, with the heartiest smack of his hand on the prompt book. "'She's a born actress, if ever there was one yet.' "'I hope not,' said Miss Garth to herself, taking up the work which had dropped into her lab, and looking down at it in some perplexity. Her worst apprehension of results in connection with the theatrical enterprise had foreboded levity of conduct with some of the gentlemen. She had not bargained for this. MacBellan, in the capacity of a thoughtless girl, was comparatively easy to deal with. MacBellan, in the character of a born actress, threatened serious future difficulties. The rehearsal proceeded. Lucy returned to the stage for her scenes in the second act, the last in which she appears, with solucious and fag. Here again MacBellan's inexperience betrayed itself, and here once more her resolution in attacking and conquering her own mistakes astonished everybody. "'Bravo!' cried the gentleman behind the scenes, as she steadily trembled down one blundery after another. "'Ridiculous!' said the ladies, with such a small part as hers. "'Heaven't forgive me,' thought Miss Garth, coming round unwillingly to the general opinion. I almost wish we were papists, and I had a convent to put her in to-morrow.' One of Mr. Marrable's servants entered the theatre, as that desperate aspiration escaped the governess. She instantly sent the man behind the scene with a message. Miss Venston has done her part in the rehearsal, request her to come here and sit by me. The servant returned with a polite apology. Miss Venston's kind love, and she begs to be excused, she's prompting Mr. Clare. She prompted him to such purpose that he actually got through his part. The performances of the other gentlemen were obtrusively imbecile. Frank was just one degree better, he was modestly incapable, and he gained by comparison. Thanks to Miss Venston, observed the manager, who had heard the prompting, she pulled him through. We shall be flat enough at night when the drop falls on the second act and the audience have seen the last of her. It's a thousand pities, she hasn't got a better part. It's a thousand mercies, she has no more to do than she has, muttered Miss Garth, overhearing him. As things are, the people can't well turn her head with applause. She's out of play in the second act, that's one comfort. No well-regulated mind ever draws its inferences in a hurry. Miss Garth's mind was well-regulated. Therefore, logically speaking, Miss Garth ought to have been superior to the weakness of rushing at conclusions. It committed that error nevertheless under present circumstances. In plainer terms, the consoling reflection which had just occurred to her, assumed that the playhead by this time survived all its disasters, and entered on its long-deferred career of success. The play had done nothing of the sort. Miss Fortune and the Marible Family had not parted company yet. When the rehearsal was over, nobody observed that the stout lady with the wig privately withdrew herself from the company, and when she was afterward missed from the table of refreshments which Mr. Marible's hospitality kept ready spread in a room near the theatre, nobody imagined that there was any serious reason for her absence. It was not till the ladies and gentlemen assembled for the next rehearsal that the true state of the case was impressed on the minds of the company. At the appointed hour, no Julia appeared. In her stead, Mrs. Marible pretentiously approached the stage with an open letter in her hand. She was naturally a lady of the mildest good breeding. She was mischievous of every bland conventionality in the English language. But disasters and dramatic influences combined through even this harmless matron of her balance at last. For the first time in her life, Mrs. Marible indulged in vehement gesture and used strong language. She handed the letter sternly, at arm's length, to her daughter. My dear, she said, with an aspect of awful composure, we are under a curse. Before the amazed dramatic company quit petition for an explanation, she turned and left the room. The manager's professional eye followed her out respectfully. He looked as if he approved of the exit from a theatrical point of view. What new misfortune had befallen the play. The last and worst of all misfortunes had assailed it. The stout lady had resigned her part. Not maliciously. Her heart, which had been in the right place throughout, remained inflexibly in the right place still. Her explanation of the circumstances proved this, if nothing else did. The letter began with a statement. She had overheard at the last rehearsal, quite unintentionally, personal remarks of which she was a subject. They might or might not have had reference to her hair and her figure. She would not distress Mrs. Marable by repeating them. Neither would she mention names, because it was foreign to her nature to make bad worse. The only cause at all consistent with her own self-respect was to resign her part. She enclosed it accordingly to Mrs. Marable, with many apologies for her presumption in undertaking a youthful character at what the gentleman was pleased to term her age, and with what two ladies were rude enough to characterize as her disadvantages of hair and figure. A younger and more attractive representative of Julia would no doubt be easily found. In the meantime, all persons concerned had her full forgiveness, to which she would only beg leave to add her best and kindest wishes for the success of the play. Then, four nights more, the play was to be performed. If ever any human enterprise stood in need of good wishes to help it, that enterprise was unquestionably the theatrical entertainment at Evergreen Lodge. One armchair was allowed on the stage, and into that armchair Mrs. Marable sank, preparatory to a fit of hysterics. Magdalen stepped forward at the first convulsion, snatched the letter from Mrs. Marable's hand, and stopped the threatened catastrophe. She's an ugly, bald-headed, malicious, middle-aged wretch, said Magdalen, tearing the letter into fragments and tossing them over the heads of the company. But I can tell her one thing. She shan't spoil the play. I'll act, Julia." Bravo! cried the chorus of gentlemen, the anonymous gentleman who had helped to do the mischief. Otherwise Mr. Francis Clair, loudest of all. If you want the truth, I don't shrink from owning it, continued Magdalen. I'm one of the ladies she means. I said she had a head like a mob and a waist like a bolster, so she has. I'm the other lady, added the spinster relative, but I only said she was too stout for the part. I'm the gentleman, chimed in frank, stimulated by the force of example. I said nothing. I only agreed with the ladies. Here Miss Garth sees her opportunity and addresses the stage loudly from the pit. Stop! Stop! she said. You can't settle the difficulty that way. If Magdalen plays Julia, who's to play Lucy? Miss Marible sank back in the armchair and gave way to the second convulsion. Stuff and nonsense! cried Magdalen. The thing's simple enough. I'll act Julia and Lucy both together. The manager was consulted on the spot. Suppressing Lucy's first entrance and turning the short dialogue about the novels into a soliloquy for Lydia Langwish appeared to be the only changes of importance necessary to the accomplishment of Magdalen's project. Lucy's two telling scenes at the end of the first and second acts were sufficiently removed from the scenes in which Julia appeared to give time for the necessary transformations in dress. Even Miss Garth, though she tried hard to find them, could put no fresh obstacles in the way. The question was settled in five minutes and the rehearsal went on. Magdalen learning Julia's stage situations with a book in her hand and announcing afterward on the journey home that she proposed sitting up all night to study the new part. Frank, thereupon, expressed his fears that she would have no time left to help him through his theoretical difficulties. She tapped him on the shoulder, cuckettishly, with her part. You foolish fellow, how am I to do without you? You're Julia's jealous lover. You're always making Julia cry. Come to-night and make me cry at tea-time. You haven't got a venomous old woman in a wig to act with now. It's my heart you to break, and of course I shall teach you how to do it. The four days interval passed busily in perpetual rehearsals, public and private. The night of performance arrived. The guests assembled. The great dramatic experiment stood on its trial. Magdalen had made the most of her opportunities. She had learned all that the manager could teach her in the time. Lysgarth left her when the overture began, sitting apart in a corner behind the scenes, serious and silent, with her smelling bottle in one hand and her book in the other, resolutely training herself for the coming ordeal to the very last. The play began, with all the proper accompaniments of a theatrical performance in private life, with a crowded audience, an African temperature, a bursting of heated lamp-glasses, and a difficulty in drawing up the curtain. Magdalen and the coachman, who opened the scene, took leave of their memories as soon as they stepped on the stage, left half their dialogue unspoken, came to a dead pause, were audibly untreated by the invisible manager to come off, and went off accordingly, in every respect sadder and wiser man than when they went on. The next scene disclosed Miss Marable as Lydia Langwish, gracefully seated, very pretty, beautifully dressed, accurately mistress of the smallest words in her part, possessed in short of every personal resource, except her voice. The ladies admired, the gentlemen applauded. Nobody heard anything but the words, Speak up, Miss, whispered by the same voice which had already entreated Fagg and the coachman to come off. The responsive titter rose among the younger spectators, checked immediately by magnanimous applause. The temperature of the audience was rising to blood-heat, but the national sense of fair play was not boiled out of them yet. In the midst of the demonstration, Magdalene quietly made her first entrance as Julia. She was dressed very plainly in dark colors, and wore her own hair. All stage adjuncts and alterations, accepting the slightest possible touch of rouge on her cheeks, having been kept in reserve to disguise her the more effectually in her second part. The grace and simplicity of her costume, the steady self-possession with which she looked out over the eager rows of faces before her, raised a low hum of approval and expectation. She spoke after suppressing a momentary tremor with a quiet distinctness of utterance which reached all ears and which at once confirmed the favorable impression that her appearance had produced. The one member of the audience who looked at her and listened to her coldly was her elder sister. Before the actress of the evening had been five minutes on the stage, Nora detected, to her own indescribable astonishment, that Magdalene had audaciously individualized the feeble amability of Julia's character by seizing no lesser person than herself as the model to act it by. She saw all her own little formal peculiarities of manna and movement unblushingly reproduced, and even the very tone of her voice so accurately mimicked from time to time that the accents startled her as if she was speaking herself with an echo on the stage. The effect of this cool appropriation of Nora's identity to theatrical purposes on the audience, who only saw results, asserted itself in a storm of applause on Magdalene's exit. She had won two incontestable triumphs in her first scene. By a dexterous piece of mimicry, she had made a living reality of one of the most insipid characters in the English drama, and she had roused enthusiasm and audience of two hundred exiles from the blessings of ventilation, all simmering together in their own animal heat. Under the circumstances, where is the actress by profession who could have done much more? But the event of the evening was still to come. Magdalene's disguised reappearance at the end of the act in the character of Lucy, with false hair and false eyebrows, with a bright red complexion and patches on her cheeks, with the gayest colours flaunting in her dress, and the shrillest vivacity of voice and manner, fairly staggered the audience. They looked down at their programs, in which the representative of Lucy, figured under an assumed name, looked up again at the stage, penetrated the disguise, and vented their astonishment in another round of applause, louder and harder even than the last. Nora herself could not deny this time that the tribute of approbation had been well-deserved, there forcing its way steadily through all the faults of inexperience, there plainly visible to the dullest of the spectators was the rare faculty of dramatic impersonation expressing itself in every look and action of this girl of eighteen who now stood on a stage for the first time in her life. Failing in many minor requisites of the double task which she had undertaken, she succeeded in the one important necessity of keeping the main distinctions of the two characters thoroughly apart. Everybody felt that the difficulty lay here, everybody saw the difficulty conquered, everybody echoed the manager's enthusiasm at rehearsal, which had hailed her as a born actress. When the drop scene descended for the first time, Macdonald had concentrated in herself the whole interests and attraction of the play. The audience politely applauded Miss Marable as became the guests assembled in her father's house, and good humorately encouraged the remainder of the company to help them through a task for which they were all more or less palpably unfit. But as the play proceeded, nothing roused them to any genuine expression of interest when Macdonald was absent from the scene. There was no disguising it. Miss Marable and her bosom friends had been all hopelessly cast in the shade by the new recruit whom they had summoned to assist them in the capacity of forlorn hope. And this on Miss Marable's own birthday, and this in her father's house, and this after the unutterable sacrifices of six weeks past. Of all the domestic disasters which the thankless theatrical enterprise had inflicted on the Marable family, the crowning Miss Fortune was now consummated by Macdonald's success. Leaving Mr. Vanston and Nora on the conclusion of the play among the guests in the supper room, Miss Garth went behind the scenes, ostensibly anxious to see if she could be of any use. It really bent on a certaining whether Macdonald's head had been turned by the triumphs of the evening. It would not have surprised Miss Garth if she had discovered her pupil in the act of making terms with the manager for her forthcoming appearance in a public theatre. As events really turned out, she found Macdonald on the stage receiving with gracious smiles a card which the manager presented to her with a professional bow. Noticing Miss Garth's mute look of inquiry, the civil little man hastened to explain that the card was his own, and that he was merely asking the favour of Miss Vanston's recommendation at any future opportunity. This is not the last time the young lady will be concerned in private theatricals or answer for it, said the manager, and if a superintendent is wanted on the next occasion she has kindly promised to say a good word for me. I am always to be heard of, Miss, at that address. Saying those words he bowed again and discreetly disappeared. Vague suspicions beset the mind of Miss Garth and urged her to insist on looking at the card. No more harmless morsel of paced board was ever passed from one hand to another. The card contained nothing but the manager's name and under it the name and address of theatrical agent in London. It is not worth the trouble of keeping, said Miss Garth. Magdalen caught her hand before she could throw the card away, possessed herself of it the next instant, and put it in her pocket. I promised to recommend him, she said, and that's one reason for keeping his card. If it does nothing else it will remind me of the happiest evening of my life, and that's another. Come, she cried, throwing her arms round Miss Garth with a feverish gaiety. Congratulate me on my success. I will congratulate you when you have got over it, said Miss Garth. In half an hour more Magdalen had changed her dress, had joined the guests, and had soared into an atmosphere of congratulation high above the reach of any controlling influence that Miss Garth could exercise. Frank, dilatory in all his proceedings, was the last of the dramatic company who left the precincts of the stage. He made no attempt to join Magdalen in the supper room, but he was ready in the hole with her cloak when the carriages were cold and the party broke up. Oh Frank, she said, looking round at him as he put the cloak on her shoulders. I'm so sorry it's all over. Come tomorrow morning and let's talk about it by ourselves. In the shrubbery at Ten, asked Frank in a whisper, she drew up the hood of her cloak and nodded to him gaily. Miss Garth, standing near, noticed the looks that passed between them, though the disturbance made by the parting guests prevented her from hearing the words. There was a soft underlying tenderness in Magdalen's assumed gaity of manner. There was a sudden thoughtfulness in her face, a confidential readiness in her hand as she took Frank's arm and went out to the carriage. What did it mean? Had her passing interest in him as a stage pupil treacherously sown the seeds of any deeper interest in him as a man? Had the idle theatrical scheme now that it was all over, graver results to answer fool than a mischievous waste of time? The lines on Miss Garth's face deepened and hardened, she stood lost among the fluttering crowd around her. Nora's warning words addressed to Mrs. Vanston in the garden recurred to her memory, and now, for the first time, the idea dawned on her that Nora had seen the consequences in their true light. End of chapter 6 from the first scene. First scene, chapter 7 of No Name. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Magdalena Cook. No Name by Wilkie Collins. First scene, chapter 7. Early the next morning, Miss Garth and Nora met in the garden and spoke together privately. The only noticeable result of the interview when they presented themselves at the breakfast table appeared in the marked solans which they both maintained on the topic of the theatrical performance. Mrs. Vanston was entirely indebted to her husband and to her youngest daughter for all that she had heard of the evening's entertainment. The governess and the elder daughter had evidently determined on letting the subject drop. After breakfast was over, Magdalena proved to be missing when the ladies assembled as usual in the morning room. Her habits were so little regular that Mrs. Vanston felt neither surprised nor uneasiness at her absence. Miss Garth and Nora looked at one another significantly and waited in silence. Two hours passed and there were no signs of Magdalena. Nora rose as the clock struck twelve and quietly left the room to look for her. She was not upstairs dusting her jewellery and disarranging her dresses. She was not in the conservatory, not in the flower garden, not in the kitchen teasing the cook, not in the yard playing with the dogs. Had she by any chance gone out with father? Mr. Vanston had announced his intention at the breakfast table of paying a morning visit to his old ally, Mr. Clare, and of rousing the philosopher's sarcastic indignation by an account of the dramatic performance. None of the other ladies at Comby Raven ever ventured themselves inside the cottage. But Magdalena was reckless enough for anything. And Magdalena might have gone there. As the odour occurred to her, Nora entered the shrubbery. At the second turning, where the path among the trees wound away out of sight of the house, she came suddenly face to face with Magdalena and Frank. They were sauntering toward her, arm in arm, their heads close together, their conversation apparently proceeding in whispers. They looked suspiciously handsome and happy. At the sight of Nora, both started and both stopped. Frank confusedly raised his hat and turned back in the direction off his father's cottage. Magdalena advanced to meet her sister, carelessly swinging her clothes parasol from side to side, carelessly humming an air from the overture which had preceded the rising of the curtain on the previous night. Lunch and time all ready, she said, looking at her watch, surely not. Have you and Mr. Francis Clare been alone in the shrubbery since ten o'clock? asked Nora. Mr. Francis Clare, how ridiculously formal you are. Why don't you call him Frank? I asked you a question, Magdalena. Damn me! How black you look this morning. I'm in disgrace, I suppose. Haven't you forgiven me yet for my acting last night? I couldn't help it, love. I should have made nothing of Julia if I hadn't taken you for my model. Quite a question of art. In your place, I should have felt flattered by the selection. In your place, Magdalena, I should have thought twice before I mimicked my sister to an audience of strangers. That's exactly why I did it, an audience of strangers. How are they to know? Come, come. Don't be angry. You are eight years older than I am. You ought to set me an example of good humour. I will set you an example of plain speaking. I am more sorry than I can say, Magdalena, to meet you as I met you here just now. What next, I wonder? You meet me in the shrubbery at home, talking over the private theatricals with my old play fellow, whom I knew when I was no taller than this parasol. And that is a glaring improprietary, is it? Honest, sweet Queen Mallie Pence. You wanted an answer a minute ago. There it is for you, my dear, in the choice as Norman French. I am in earnest about this, Magdalena. Not a doubt of it. Nobody can accuse you of ever making jokes. I am seriously sorry. Oh, dear. It is quite useless to interrupt me. I have it on my conscience to tell you, and I will tell you, that I am sorry to see how this intimacy is growing. I am sorry to see a secret understanding established already between you and Mr Francis Clare. Poor Frank, how you do hate him, to be sure. What on earth has he done to offend you? Nora's self-control began to show signs of failing her. Her dark cheeks glowed, her delicate lips trembled before she spoke again. Magdalena paid more attention to her parasol than to her sister. She tossed it high in the air and caught it. Once, she said, and tossed it up again. Twice, and she tossed it higher. Thrice. Before she could catch it for the third time, Nora seized her passionately by the arm, and the parasol dropped to the ground between them. You were treating me heartlessly, she said, for shame, Magdalena, for shame. The irrepressible outburst of a reserved nature, forced into open self-assertion in its own despite, is of all moral forces the hardest to resist. Magdalena was startled into silence. For a moment the two sisters, so strangely dissimilar in person and character, faced one another, without a word passing between them. For a moment the deep brown eyes of the elder and the light gray eyes of the younger looked into each other with steady, unyielding scrutiny on either side. Nora's face was the first to change. Nora's head was the first to turn away. She dropped her sister's arm in silence. Magdalena stooped and picked up her parasol. I tried to keep my temper, she said, and you call me heartless for doing it. You always were hard on me, and you always will be. Nora clasped her trembling hands fast in each other. Hard on you, she said, in low mournful tones, and sighed bitterly. Magdalena drew back a little, and mechanically dusted the parasol with the end of her garden cloak. Yes, she resumed doggedly. Hard on me and hard on Frank. Frank, repeated Nora, advancing on her sister and turning pale as suddenly as she had turned red. Do you talk of yourself and Frank as if your interests were one already? Magdalena, if I hurt you, do I hurt him? Is he so near and so dear to you as that? Magdalena drew further and further back, a twig from a tree near called her cloak. She turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the ground. What right have you to question me? she broke out on a sudden. Whether I like Frank or whether I don't, what interest is it of yours? As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass her sister and return to the house. Nora, turning paler and paler, barred the way to her. If I hold you by main force, she said, you shall stop and hear me. I have watched this Francis clear. I know him better than you do. He is unworthy of a moment serious feeling on your part. He is unworthy of our dear, good, kind-hearted father's interest in him. A man with any principle, any honour, any gratitude, would not have come back as he has come back. Disgraced, yes. Disgraced by a spiritless neglect of his own duty. I watched his face while a friend who has been better than a father to him was comforting and forgiving him with a kindness he had not deserved. I watched his face, and I saw no shame and no distress in it. I saw nothing but a look of thankless heartless relief. He is selfish. He is ungrateful. He is ungenerous. He is only twenty, and he has the worst failings of a mean old age already. And this is the man I find you meeting in secret. The man who has taken such a place in your favour that you are deaf to the truth about him, even from my lips. Magdalene, this will end ill. For God's sake, think of what I have said to you, and control yourself before it's too late. She stopped, vehement and breathless, and caught her sister anxiously by the hand. Magdalene looked at her in unconcealed astonishment. You are so violent, she said, and so unlike yourself that I hardly know you. The more patient I am, the more hard words I get for my pains. You have taken a perverse hatred to Frank, and you are unreasonably angry with me because I won't hate him too. Don't, Nora. You hurt my hand. Nora pushed the hand from her contemptuously. I shall never hurt your heart, she said, and suddenly turned her back on Magdalene as she spoke the words. There was a momentary pause. Nora kept her position. Magdalene looked at her perplexedly, hesitated, then walked away by herself toward the house. At the turn in the shrubbery path, she stopped and looked back uneasily. Oh, dear, dear, she thought to herself, why didn't Frank go when I told him? She hesitated and went back a few steps. There's Nora standing on her dignity, as obstinate as ever. She stopped again. What had I better do? I hate quarrelling. I think I'll make up. She ventured close to her sister and touched her on the shoulder. Nora never moved. It's not often she flies into a passion, thought Magdalene, touching her again. But when she does, what a time it lasts her. Come, she said, give me a kiss, Nora, and make it up. Won't you let me get at any part of you, my dear, but the back of your neck? Well, it's a very nice neck. It's better worth kissing than mine. And there the kiss is, in spite of you. She caught fast hold of Nora from behind and suited the action to the word with a total disregard of all that had just passed, which her sister was far from emulating. Hardly a minute since the warm outpouring of Nora's heart had burst through all obstacles, had the eyes to reserve frozen her up again already. It was hard to say. She never spoke. She never changed her position. She only searched hurriedly for her handkerchief. As she drew it out, there was the sound of approaching footsteps in the inner recesses of the shrubbery. A Scotch terrier scamp at interview, and a cheerful boy sang the first lines of the glee in As You Like It. It's Papa, cried Magdalene. Come, Nora, come and meet him. Instead of following her sister, Nora pulled down the veil of her garden hat, turned in the opposite direction, and hurried back to the house. She ran up to her own room and locked herself in. She was crying bitterly. End of Chapter 7 First scene, Chapter 8 of No Name This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Magdalene Cook No Name by Wilkie Collins First scene, Chapter 8 When Magdalene and her father met in the shrubbery, Mr Vanstone's face showed plainly that something had happened to please him since he had left home in the morning. He answered the question which his daughter's curiosity at once addressed to him, by informing her that he had just come from Mr Clare's cottage, and that he had picked up in that unpromising locality a startling piece of news for the family at home, Rayburn. On entering the philosopher's study that morning, Mr Vanstone had found him still dawdling over his late breakfast, with an open letter by his side in place of the book which on other occasions lay ready to his hand at mealtimes. He held up the letter the moment his visitor came into the room, and abruptly opened the conversation by asking Mr Vanstone if his nerves were in good order, and if he felt himself strong enough for the shock of an overwhelming surprise. Nerves, repeated Mr Vanstone. Thank God, I know nothing about my nerves. If you have got anything to tell me, shock or no shock, out with it on the spot. Mr Clare held the letter a little higher, and frowned at his visitor across the breakfast table. What have I always told you? he asked, with his sourer solemnity of look and manner. A great deal more than I could ever keep in my head, answered Mr Vanstone. In your presence and out of it, continued Mr Clare, I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is the enormous prosperity of fools. Show me an individual fool, and I will show you an aggregate society which gives the highly favoured personage nine chances out of ten, and grudges the tenth to the wisest man in existence. Look where you will, in every high place there sits an ass. Settle beyond the reach of all the greatest intellects in the world to pull him down. Over our whole social system, complacement in facility rules supreme, snuffs out the searching light of intelligence with total impunity, and hoots our like in answer to every form of protest. See how well we all do in the dark? One of these days, that audacious assertion will be practically contradicted, and the whole rotten system of modern society will come down with a crash. God forbid, cried Mr Vanstone, looking about him as if the crash was coming already. With a crash, repeated Mr Clare, there is my theory in few words. Now, for the remarkable application of it which this letter suggests, here is my lout of a boy. You don't mean that Frank has got another chance, exclaimed Mr Vanstone. Here is the perfectly hopeless booby Frank, pursued the philosopher. He has never done anything in his life to help himself, and, as a necessary consequence, society is in a conspiracy to carry him to the top of the tree. He has hardly had time to throw away that chance you gave him before this letter comes, and puts the ball at his foot for the second time. My rich cousin, who is intellectually fit to be at the tail of the family, and who is, therefore, as a matter of course, at the head of it, has been good enough to remember my existence, and has offered his influence to serve my eldest boy. Read this letter, and then observe the sequence of events. My rich cousin is a booby who thrives on landed property. He has done something for another booby who thrives on politics, who knows the third booby who thrives on commerce, who can do something for a fourth booby thriving at present on nothing, whose name is Frank. So the mill goes. So the cream of all human rewards is sipped in endless succession by the fools. I shall pack Frank off to-morrow. In course of time he'll come back again on our hands like a bad shilling. More chances will fall in his way, as a necessary consequence of his meritorious imbecility. Years will go on. I may not live to see it. No more than you. It doesn't matter. Frank's future is equally certain either way. Put him into the army, the church, politics, what you please, and let him drift. He'll end him being a general, a bishop, or minister of state, but dint of the great modern qualification of doing nothing, whatever to deserve his place. With his summary of his son's worldly prospects, Mr. Clare tossed the letter contemptuously across the table, and poured himself out another cup of tea. Mr. Vanstone read the letter with eager interest and pleasure. It was written in a tone of somewhat elaborate cordiality, but the practical advantages which had placed at Frank's disposal were beyond all doubt. The writer had the means of using a friend's interest, interest of no ordinary kind, with a great mercantile firm in the city, and he had at once exerted this influence in favour of Mr. Clare's eldest boy. Frank would be received in the office on a very different footing from the footing of an ordinary clerk. He would be pushed on at every available opportunity, and the first good thing the house had to offer, either at home or abroad, would be placed at his disposal. If he possessed fair abilities and showed common diligence in exercising them, his fortune was made, and the sooner he was sent to London to begin the better for his own interests it would be. Wonderful news, cried Mr. Vanstone, returning the letter. I'm delighted. I must go back and tell them at home. This is fifty times the chance that mine was. What the Jews do you mean by abusing society? Society has behaved uncommonly well, in my opinion. Where's Frank? Lurking, said Mr. Clare, it is one of the intolerable peculiarities of louts that they always lurk. I haven't seen my lout this morning. If you meet with him anywhere, give him a kick and say I want him. Mr. Clare's opinion of his son's habits might have been expressed more politely as to form, but as to substance it happened on that particular morning to be perfectly correct. After leaving Magdalene, Frank had waited in the shrubbery at a safe distance on the chance that she might detach herself from her sister's company and join him again. Mr. Vanstone's appearance immediately on Nora's departure, instead of encouraging him to show himself, had determined him on returning to the cottage. He walked back discontentedly, and so fell into his father's clutches, totally unprepared for the pending announcement, in that formidable quarter of his departure for London. In the meantime, Mr. Vanstone had communicated his news in the first place to Magdalene, and afterward on getting back to the house to his wife and Miss Garth. He was too unobservant a man to notice that Magdalene looked unaccountably startled, and Miss Garth unaccountably relieved, by his announcement of Frank's good fortune. He talked on about it quite unsuspiciously, until the luncheon bell rang, and then for the first time he noticed Nora's absence. She sent a message downstairs, after they had assembled at the table, to say that a headache was keeping her in her own room. When Miss Garth went up shortly afterward to communicate the news about Frank, Nora appeared, strangely enough to feel very little relieved by hearing it. Mr. Francis Clear had gone away on a former occasion, she remarked, and had come back. He might come back again, and sooner than they any of them thought for. She said no more on the subject than this. She made no reference to what had taken place in the shrubbery. Her unconquerable reserves seemed to have strengthened its hold on her since the outburst of the morning. She met Magdalene later in the day, as if nothing had happened. No formal reconciliation took place between them, it was one of Nora's peculiarities to shrink from all reconciliations that were openly ratified, and to take her shy refuge in reconciliations that were silently implied. Magdalene saw plainly, in her look and manner, that she had made her first and last protest. Whether the motive was pride or sulleness, or distrust of herself, or despair of doing good, their result was not to be mistaken. Nora had resolved on remaining passive for the future. Later in the afternoon Mr Vanstone suggested a drive to his eldest daughter, as the best remedy for her headache. She readily consented to accompany her father, who thereupon proposed, as usual, that Magdalene should join them. Magdalene was nowhere to be found. For the second time that day she had wandered into the grounds by herself. On this occasion Miss Scarth, who, after adopting Nora's opinions, had passed from the one extreme of overlooking Frank altogether, to the other extreme of believing him capable of planning and elopement at five minutes' notice, volunteered to set forth immediately and do her best to find the missing young lady. After a prolonged absence she returned unsuccessful, with the strongest persuasion in her own mind that Magdalene and Frank had secretly met one another somewhere, but without having discovered the smallest fragment of evidence to confirm her suspicions. By this time the carriage was at the door, and Mr Vanstone was unwilling to wait any longer. He and Nora drove away together, and Mrs Vanstone and Miss Scarth sat at home over their work. In half an hour more Magdalene composedly walked into the room. She was pale and depressed. She received Miss Scarth's remonstrances with a weary inattention, explained carelessly that she had been wandering in the wood, took up some books and put them down again, sighed impatiently, and went away upstairs to her own room. I think Magdalene is feeling the reaction after yesterday, said Mrs Vanstone quietly. It is just as we thought. Now the theatrical amusements are all over, she is fretting for more. Here was an opportunity of letting in the light of truth on Mrs Vanstone's mind, which was too favourable to be missed. Miss Scarth questioned her conscience, saw her chance, and took it on the spot. You forget, she rejoined, that a certain neighbour of ours is going away to-morrow. Shall I tell you the truth? Magdalene is fretting over the departure of Frances Claire. Mrs Vanstone looked up from her work with a gentle smiling surprise. Surely not, she said. It is natural enough that Frank should be attracted by Magdalene, but I can't think that Magdalene returns the feeling. Frank is so very unlike her, so quiet and undemonstrative, so dull and helpless, poor fellow, in some things. He is handsome, I know, but he is so singly unlike Magdalene that I can't think it possible. I can't indeed. My dear good lady, cried Miss Scarth, in great amazement. Do you really suppose that people fall in love with each other, on account of similarities in their characters? In the vast majority of cases, they do just the reverse. Men marry the very last women, and women, the very last men, whom their friends would think it possible they could care about. Is there any phrase that is often on all our lips, then, what can have made Mr. So-and-So marry that woman? Or, how could Mrs. So-and-So throw herself away on that man? Has all your experience of the world never yet shown you that girls take perverse fancies for men who are totally unworthy of them? Very true, said Mrs. Vanstone, composedly. I forgot that. Still, it seems unaccountable, doesn't it? Unaccountable, because it happens every day, retorted Miss Scarth good-humidly. I know a great many excellent people who reason against plain experience in the same way, who read the newspapers in the morning and deny in the evening that there is any romance for writers or painters to work upon in modern life. Seriously, Mrs. Vanstone, you may take my word for it. Thanks to those wretched theatricals, Magdalen is going the way with Frank that a great many young ladies have gone before her. He is quite unworthy of her. He is, in almost every respect, her exact opposite. And, without knowing it herself, she has fallen in love with him on that very account. She is resolute and impetuous, clever and domineering. She is not one of those model women who want a man to look up to, and to protect them. Her bow ideal, though she may not think it herself, is a man she can henpeck. Well, one comfort is, there are far better men, even of that sort, to be had than Frank. It's a mercy he is going away, before we have more trouble with them, and before any serious mischief is done. Poor Frank, said Mrs. Vanstone, smiling compassionately, we have known him since he was in jackets, and Magdalen in short frocks. Don't let us give him up yet. He may do better this second time. Miss Garth looked up in astonishment. And suppose he does better, she asked. What then? Mrs. Vanstone cut off a loose thread in her work, and laughed outright. My good friend, she said, there is an old farmyard proverb which warns us not to count our chickens before they are hatched. Let us wait a little before we count ours. It was not easy to silence Miss Garth when she was speaking under the influence of a strong conviction. But this reply closed her lips. She resumed her work and looked and thought unmutterable things. Mrs. Vanstone's behaviour was certainly remarkable under the circumstances. Here on one side was a girl with great personal attractions, with rare pecuniary prospects, with a social position which might have justified the best gentleman in the neighbourhood in making her an offer of marriage. Perversely, casting herself away on a penniless, idle young fellow who had failed at his first start in life, and who, even if he succeeded in his second attempt, must be for years to come in no position to marry a young lady of fortune on equal terms. And there, on the other side, was that girl's mother, by no means dismayed at the prospect of a connection which was, to say the least of it, far from desirable. But by no means certain, judging her by her own words and looks, that a marriage between Mr. Vanstone's daughter and Mr. Claire's son might not prove to be a satisfactory a result in the intimacy between the two young people as the parents on both sides could possibly wish for. It was perplexing in the extreme. It was almost as unintelligible as the past mystery, that forgotten mystery of now, of the journey to London. In the evening, Frank made his appearance, and announced that his father had mercilessly sentenced him to leave Comraven by the parliamentary trainer next morning. He mentioned this circumstance with an air of sentimental resignation, and listened to Mr. Vanstone's boisterous rejoicings over his new prospects with a mild and mute surprise. His gentle melancholy of look and manner greatly assisted his personal advantages. In his own effeminate way he was more handsome than ever that evening. His soft brown eyes wandered about the room with a melting tenderness. His hair was beautifully brushed, his delicate hands hung over the arms of his chair with a languid grace. He looked like a convalescent Apollo. Never on any previous occasion had he practiced more successfully the social art which he habitually cultivated, the art of casting himself on society in the character of a well-bred incubus, and conferring an obligation on his fellow creatures by allowing them to sit under him. It was undeniably a dull evening. All the talking fell to the share of Mr. Vanstone and Miss Garth. Mrs. Vanstone was habitually silent. Nora kept herself obstinately in the background. Magdalen was quiet and undemonstrative beyond all former precedent. From first to last she kept rigidly on her guard. The few meaning looks that she cast on Frank flashed at him like lightning, and were gone before anyone else could see them. Even when she brought him his tea, and when, in doing so, her self-control gave way under the temptation which no woman can resist, the temptation of touching the man she loves. Even then she held the saucer so dexterously that it screened her hand. Frank's self-percession was far less steadily disciplined. It only lasted as long as he remained passive. When he rose to go, when he felt the warm clinging pressure of Magdalen's fingers round his hand, and the lock of her hair which she slipped into her at the same moment, he became awkward and confused. He might have betrayed Magdalen and betrayed himself, but for Mr. Vanstone, who innocently covered his retreat by following him out, and patting him on the shoulder all the way. God bless you, Frank, cried the friendly voice that never had a harsh note in her for anybody. Your fortune's waiting for you. Go in, my boy. Go in and win. Yes, said Frank. Thank you. It will be rather difficult to go in and win at first. Of course, as you have always told me, a man's business is to conquer his difficulties, and not to talk about them. At the same time, I wish I didn't feel quite so loose as I do in my figures. It's discouraging to feel loose in one's figures. Oh yes, I'll write and tell you how I get on. I'm very much obliged by your kindness, and very sorry I couldn't succeed with the engineering. I think I should have light engineering better than trade. It can't be helped now, can it? Thank you again. Goodbye. So we drifted away into the misty commercial future, as aimless as helpless as gentlemen like as ever. End of Chapter 8 Scene 1, Chapter 9 of No Name This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Hanna Schoenberg. No Name by Wilkie Collins. Scene 1, Chapter 9 3 months passed. During that time, Frank remained in London, pursuing his new duties and writing occasionally to port himself to Mr. Van Stone, as he had promised. His letters were not enthusiastic on the subject of mercantile occupations. He described himself as being still painfully loose in his fingers. He was more firmly persuaded than ever, now when it was unfortunately too late, that he preferred engineering to trade. In spite of this conviction, in spite of headaches caused by sitting on a high stool and stooping over ledgers in unwholesome air, in spite of want of society and hasty breakfast and bad dinners at chop houses, his attendance at the office was regular and his diligence at the desk unremitting. The head of the department in which he was working might be referred to if any corporation of this statement was desired. Such was the general tenor of the letters, and Frank's correspondent and Frank's father differed over them as widely as usual. Mr. Van Stone accepted them as proofs of the steady development of industrious principles in the writer. Mr. Clair took his own characteristically opposite view. These London men, said the philosopher, are not to be trifled with by louts. They have got frank by the scruff of the neck, and he can't wriggle himself free, and he makes a merit of yielding to sheer necessity. Three months interval of Frank's probation in London passed less cheerfully than usual in the household at Colby Raven. As the summer came near and near, Mrs. Van Stone's spirits, in spite of her resolute efforts to control them, became more and more depressed. I do my best, she said to Ms. Garth. I set an example of cheerfulness to my husband and my children, but I dread July. Nor a secret misgivings on her sister's account rendered her more than usually serious and uncommunicative. As the year advanced, even Mr. Van Stone, when July drew near, lost something of his elasticity of spirit. He cuffed up appearances in his wife's presence, but on all other occasions was now a perceptible shade of sadness in his look and manner. Magdalen was so changed since Frank's departure that she helped the general depression instead of relieving it. All of her movements had grown languid. All of her usual occupations were pursued with the same weary indifference. She spent hours alone in her own room. She lost her interest in being brightly and prettily dressed. Her eyes were heavy. Her nerves were irritable. Her complexion was altered visibly for the worse. In one word, she'd become an oppression and a weariness to herself and all about her. Stoutly, as Miss Garth contended with these growing domestic difficulties, her own spirit suffered in the effort. Her memory reverted oftener and oftener to the March morning when the master and mistress of the house had departed for London and the first serious change for many a year past had stolen over the family atmosphere. When was that atmosphere to be clear again? When were the clouds of change to pass off before returning sunshine of past and happier times? The spring and the early summer wore away. The dreaded month of July came with its airless nights, its cloudless mornings and its sultry days. On the fifteenth of the month, an event happened which took everyone but Nora by surprise. For the second time, without the slightest apparent reason, for the second time, without a word of warning beforehand, Frank suddenly reappeared at his father's cottage. Mr. Clare's lips opened to hail his son's return in the character of the bad shilling and closed again without uttering a word. There was a pretentious composure in Frank's manner which showed that he had other news to communicate than the news of his dismissal. He answered his father's sardonic look of inquiry at once by explaining that a very important proposal for his future benefit had been made to him that morning at the office. His first idea had been to communicate the details in writing, but the partners had, on reflection, thought that the necessary decision might be more readily obtained by a personal interview with his father and his friends. He had laid aside the pen accordingly and had resigned himself to the railway on the spot. After this preliminary statement, Frank proceeded to describe the proposal which his employers had addressed to him with every external appearance of viewing it in the light of an intolerable hardship. The great firm in the city had obviously made a discovery in relation to their clerk exactly similar to this discovery which had formally forced itself on the engineer in relation to his pupil. The young man, as they politely phrased it, stood in need of some special stimulant to stir him up. His employers acting under a sense of their obligation to the gentleman by whom Frank had been recommended, had considered the question carefully and had decided that the one promising use which they could put Mr. Francis Clair was to send him forthwith into another quarter of the globe. As a consequence of this decision, it was now therefore proposed that he should enter the house of their correspondence in China, that he should remain there familiarizing himself thoroughly on the spot with the tea trade and silk trade for five years, and that he should return at expiration of this period to the central establishment in London. If he made a fair use of his opportunities in China, he would come back, lost a young man, fit for a position of trust and embellishment, and justified in looking forward at no distant date to a time when the house would assist him to start in business for himself. Such were the new prospects which, to adopt Mr. Clair's theory, now forced themselves on the ever reluctant, ever helpless, and ever ungrateful Frank. There was no time to be lost. The final answer was to be at the office on Monday, the 20th. The correspondence in China were to be written, but to by the mail on that day, and Frank was to follow the letter by the next opportunity or to resign his chance in favour of some more enterprising young man. Mr. Clair's reception of this extraordinary news was startling in the extreme. The glorious prospect of his son's banishment to China appeared to turn his brain. The firm pedestal of his philosophy sank under him, prejudices of his society recovered their hold on his mind. He seized Frank by the arm and actually accompanied him to Kobe Raven, an amazing character of visitor to the house. Here I am with my lout, said Mr. Clair, before a word could be uttered by the astonished family. Hear his story, all of you. It has reconciled me for the first time in my life to the anomaly of his existence. Frank ruefully narrated the Chinese proposal for the second time and attempted to attach to it his own supplementary statement of objections and difficulties. His father stopped him at the first word, pointed preemptorily southeastward from Somerset Chire to China, and said without an instant hesitation, go. Mr. Van Stone, basking in his golden visions of his young friend's future, echoed that monosyllabic decision with all his heart. Mrs. Van Stone, Ms. Garth, even Nora herself spoke to the same purpose. Frank was petrified by an absolute unanimity of opinion which he had not anticipated, and Magdalen was caught for once in her life at the end of all her resources. As far as practical results were concerned, the sitting of the family council began and ended with the general opinion that Frank must go. Mr. Van Stone's faculties were so bewildered by the son's sudden arrival. The father's unexpected visit and the news they both brought with them that he petitioned for an adjournment before the necessary arrangements connected with his young friend's departure were considered in detail. Suppose we all sleep upon it, he said. Tomorrow our heads will feel a little steadier and tomorrow will be time enough to decide all uncertainties. This suggestion was readily adopted and all further proceedings stood adjourned till the next day. The next day was destined to decide more uncertainties than Mr. Van Stone dreamed of. Early in the morning, after making tea by herself as usual, Ms. Garth took her parasol and strolled into the garden. She had slept ill and ten minutes in the open air before the family assembled for breakfast might help compensate her, as she thought, for the loss of her night's rest. She wandered into the outermost boundary of the flower garden and then returned by another path which led back past the side of an ornamental summer house, commanding a view over the fields from a corner of the lawn. A slight noise, like and yet not like the chirping of a bird, caught her ear as she approached the summer house. She stepped round to the entrance, looked in and discovered Magdalen and Frank seated close together. To Ms. Garth's horror, Magdalen's arm was unmistakably around Frank's neck and, worse still, the position of her face at the moment of discovery showed beyond all doubt that she had just been offering to the victim of Chinese commerce the first and foremost of all consolations which a woman can bestow on a man. In plainer words, she had just given Frank a kiss. In the presence of such an emergency, as now confronted her, Ms. Garth felt instinctively that all ordinary phrases of reproof would be phrases thrown away. I presume, she remarked, addressing Magdalen with the merciless self-possession of a middle-aged lady, unprovided for the occasion with any kisses or membrances of her own. I presume whatever excuses your efferentry may suggest. You will not deny that my duty compels me to mention what I have just seen to your father. I will save you the trouble, replied Magdalen, composedly. I will mention it to him myself. With those words, she looked round at Frank, standing trebly helpless in the corner of the summer house. You shall hear what happens, she said, with her bright smile, and so shall you, she added, for Ms. Garth's special benefit. As she sauntered past the governess on her way back to the breakfast table, the eyes of Ms. Garth followed her indignantly, and Frank slipped out on his side at that favorable opportunity. Under these circumstances, there was but one course that any respectable woman could take. She could only shudder. Ms. Garth resigned her protest in that form, and returned to the house. When breakfast was over, and when Mr. Vanstone's hand ascended to his pocket in search of his cigar case, Magdalen rose, looked significantly at Ms. Garth, and followed her father into the hall. Papa, she said, I want to speak to you this morning, in private. Aye, aye! returned Mr. Vanstone. What about, my dear? About, Magdalen hesitated, searching for a satisfactory form of expression, and found it. About business, Papa, she said. Mr. Vanstone took his garden hat from the hall table, opened his eyes, and mute her plexity, attempted to associate in his mind the two extravagantly dissimilar ideas of Magdalen and business failed, and led the way resignedly into the garden. His daughter took his arm and walked with him to a shady seat at a convenient distance from the house. She dusted the seat with a smart silk apron before her father occupied it. Mr. Vanstone was not accustomed to such extraordinary act of attention as this. He sat down looking more puzzled than ever. Magdalen immediately placed herself on his knee and rested her head comfortably on his shoulder. Am I heavy, Papa? she asked. Yes, my dear, you are, said Mr. Vanstone, but not too heavy for me. Stop on your perch, if you like it. Well, what does this business happen to be? It begins with a question. Ah, indeed? That doesn't surprise me. Business with your sex, my dear, always begins with questions. Go on. Papa, do you ever intend allowing me to be married? Mr. Vanstone's eyes opened wider and wider. The question, to use his own phrase, completely staggered him. This is business with inventions, he said. Why, Magdalen, what have you got into that? Here, I'm scared I'm ahead of yours now. I don't exactly know, Papa. Will you answer my question? I will if I can, my dear. You rather stagger me. Well, I don't know. Yes, I suppose I must let you be married one of these days if we can find a good husband for you. How hot your face is! Lift it up and let the air blow over it. You won't? Well, have it your own way. If talking of business means tickling your cheek against my whisker, I have nothing to say against it. Go on, my dear, what's the next question? Come to the point. She was far too genuine a woman to do anything of the sort. She skirted round the point and calculated her distance to the nicety of a hair-bread. We all very much surprised yesterday, were we not, Papa? Frank is wonderfully lucky, isn't he? He's the luckiest dog I ever came across, said Mr. Vanstone. But what has this got to do with this business of yours? I daresay to see it your way, Magdalen. Hang me if I see mine. She skirted a little nearer. I suppose he will make his fortune in China, she said. It's a long way off, isn't it? Do you observe, Papa, that Frank looks sadly out of spirits yesterday? I was so surprised by the news, said Mr. Vanstone, and so staggered by the sight of old Claire's sharp nose in my house that I didn't much notice. Now you remind me of it. Yes, I don't think Frank took too kindly to his own good luck, not kindly at all. Do you wonder at that, Papa? Yes, my dear, I do, rather. Don't you think it's hard to be sent away for five years to make your fortune among hateful savages and lose sight of your friends at home for all that long? Don't you think Frank will miss us sadly? Don't you, Papa? Don't you? Gently, Magdalen. You're too old for these long arms of yours to throttle me in fun. You're right, my love. Nothing in this world without a drawback. Frank will miss his friends in England. There's no denying that. You've always liked Frank. And Frank has always liked you. Yes, yes. A good fellow. A quiet, good fellow. Frank and I have always got on smoothly together. You've got on like a father and son, haven't you? Certainly, my dear. Perhaps you will think it harder on him when he is gone than you think it now. Likely enough, Magdalen, I don't say no. Perhaps you will wish he had stopped in England. Why shouldn't he stop in England and do as well as he went to China? My dear, he has no prospects in England. I wish he had, for his own sake. I wish the lad well with all my heart. May I wish him well too, Papa, with all my heart? Certainly, my love. You're old playfellow. Why not? What's the matter? God bless your soul. What is the girl crying about? One would think Frank was transported for life. You goose. You know as well as I do, he's going to China to make his fortune. He doesn't want to make his fortune. He might do much better. The deuce he might? I should like to know. I'm afraid to tell you. I'm afraid you'll laugh at me. Will you promise not to laugh at me? Anything to please you, my dear? Yes, I promise. Now then, get out with it. How might Frank do better? He might marry me. If the summer scene, which then spread before Mr. Van Stan's eyes, had suddenly changed to a dreary winter view, if the trees had lost all of their leaves and the green fields had turned white with snow in an instant, his face could hardly have expressed greater amazement than it displayed when his daughter's faltering voice spoke these last four words. He tried to look at her, but then he steadily refused in the opportunity. She kept her face hidden over his shoulder. Was she in earnest? His cheeks still wet with her tears answered for her. It was a long pause of silence. She waited with unaccustomed patience. She waited for him to speak. He roused himself and spoke these words only. You surprise me, Magdalen. You surprise me more than I can say. At the altered tone of his voice, altered to a quiet, fatherly seriousness, Magdalen's arm clung round him closer than before. Have I disappointed you, Papa? She asked faintly. Don't say I have disappointed you. Who am I to tell my secret to, if not you? Don't let him go. Don't. Don't. You will break his heart. He's afraid to tell his father. He's even afraid you might be angry with him. There is nobody to speak for us except me. Oh, don't let him go. Don't for his sake, she whispered the next words in the kiss. Don't for mine. Her father's kind face saddened. He sighed and patted her. They are head tenderly. Hush, my love, he said almost in a whisper. Hush. She knew what a revelation every word, every action that escaped her now, opened before him. She had made him her grown-up playfellow from her childhood to that day. She had romped with him in her frocks. She had gone on romping with him in her gowns. She had never been long enough separated from her to have the external changes in his daughter forced on his attention. His artless fatherly experience of her had taught him that she was a taller child in later years. She had taught him little more now, and now, in one breathless instant, the conviction that she was a woman rushed over his mind. He felt in the trouble of her bosom, possessed in his the nervous trill of her arms clasped around his neck. The magdalen of his innocent experience, a woman, with the master passion of her sex, in possession of her heart already. Had you thought long of this, my dear, he asked, as soon as he could speak compositely? Are you sure? She answered the question before he could finish it. Sure, I love him, she said. Oh, what words can say, yes, for me, as I want to say it. I love him. Her voice faltered softly, and her answer ended in a sigh. You are very young. You and Frank, my love, are both very young. She raised her head from his shoulder for the first time. The thought and its expression flashed from her at the same moment. Are we much younger than you and Mama were? She asked, smiling through her tears. She tried to lay her head back on its old position, but as she spoke these words, her father caught her round the waist and forced her, before she was aware of it, to look him in the face, and kissed her with a sudden outburst of tenderness, which brought the tears thronging back thickly into her eyes. Not much younger, my trilogy, he said in a low, broken tone. Not much younger than your mother and I were. He put her away from him, and rose from the seat, and turned his head aside quickly. Wait here and compose yourself. I will go indoors and speak to your mother. His voice trembled over those parting words. Me left her without once looking around again. She waited, waited a weary time, and he never came back. At last her growing anxiety urged her to follow him into the house. He knew timidity throbbed in her heart as she doubtingly approached the door. Never had she seen the depths of her father's simple nature stirred, as they had been stirred by her confession. She almost dreaded her next meeting with him. She wandered softly to and fro in the hall, with a shyness unaccountable to herself, with a terror of being discovered, and spoken to by her sister, or Miss Garth, which made her nervously susceptible to the slightest noises in the house. The door of the morning room opened, while her back was turned toward it. She started violently as she looked around and saw her father in the hall. Her heart beat faster and faster, and she felt herself turning pale. A second look at him as he came nearer reassured her. He was composed again, though not so cheerful as usual. She noticed that as he advanced and spoke to her with a forbidding gentleness, which was more like his manner to his mother than his ordinary manner to herself. Go in my love, he said, opening the door for her, which she had just closed. Tell your mother all that you have told me, and more if you have more to say. She is better prepared for you than I was. We will make today to think of it, Magdalen, and tomorrow you shall know, and Frank shall know what we decide. Her eyes brightened as they looked into his face, and saw the decision there already, with a double penetration of her womanhood and her love. Happy and beautiful in her happiness, she put his hand to her lips, and went without hesitation into the morning room. There her father's words had smoothed the way for her. There the first shock of surprise was passed over, and only the pleasure of it remained. Her mother had been her age once. Her mother would know how fond she was of Frank, so the coming interview was anticipated in her thoughts, and, except that there was an unaccountable appearance of restraint in Mrs. Vanstone's first reception of her, was anticipated alright. After a little, the mother's questions came more and more unreservedly from the sweet, unforgotten experience of her mother's heart. She lived again through her own young days of hope and love in Magdalen's replies. The next morning, the all-important decision was announced in words. Mr. Vanstone took his daughter upstairs into her mother's room, and there placed before her the result of the yesterday's consultation, of the night's reflection which had followed it. He spoke with perfect kindness and self-possession of manner but in fewer and more serious words than usual, and he held his wife's hand tenderly in his own, all through the interview. He informed Magdalen that neither he nor his mother felt themselves justified in blaming her attachment to Frank. It had been in part perhaps the natural consequence of her childish familiarity with him, in part also the result of the closer indismissibility between them which the theatrical entertainment had necessarily produced. At the same time, it was now the duty of her parents to put that attachment on both sides to a proper test. For her sake, because her happy future was their dearest care, for Frank's sake, because they were bound to give him the opportunity of showing himself worthy of their trust confided in him, they were both conscious of being strongly prejudiced in Frank's favor. His father's eccentric conduct made the lad the object of their compassion and their care from his earliest years, he and his younger brothers, had almost filled the places to them of those other children of their own whom they had lost. Although they firmly believed their good opinion of Frank to be well founded, still in the interest of their daughter's happiness, it was necessary to put that opinion firmly to the proof by fixing certain conditions and by interposing a year of delay between the contemplated marriage and the present time. During that year, Frank was to remain at the office in London, his employers being informed beforehand that family circumstances prevented his accepting their offer of employment in China. He was to consider this concession as a recognition of the attachment between Magdalen and himself on certain terms only. If during the year of probation he failed to justify the confidence placed in him, a confidence would have led Mr. Van Stone to take unreservedly upon himself the whole responsibility of Frank's future prospects, the marriage scheme was to be considered from that moment as at the end. If on the other hand, the result which Mr. Van Stone confidently looked forward really occurred, if Frank's probationary period year proved his claim to be the most precious trust that could be placed in our hands, then Magdalen herself should reward him with all that a woman can bestow and the future, which his present employers had placed before him as a result of a five years residence in China should be realized in one year's time by the dowry of his young wife. As her father drew that picture of the future, the outburst of Magdalen's gratitude could no longer be restrained. She was deeply touched. She spoke from her inmost heart. Mr. Van Stone waited until his daughter and his wife were composed again and then added the last words of explanation which were now left for him to speak. You understand my love, he said, and I'm not anticipating Frank's living in idleness on his wife's means. My plan for him is that he should still profit by the interest which his present employers take in him. Their knowledge of affairs in the city will soon place a good partnership at his disposal and you will give him the money to buy it out of hand. I shall limit the sum, my dear, to half your fortune and the other half I shall have settled upon yourself. We shall all be alive and hardy, I hope. He looked tenderly at his wife as he said these words, all alive and hardy at the year's end. But I'm gone, Magdalen. It makes no difference. My will made long before I ever thought of having a son-in-law divides my fortune into two equal parts. One part goes to your mother and the other part is fairly divided between my children. You will have your share on your wedding day and Nora will have her as when she marries. And from my own hand, if I live, we'll go under my will if I die. There, there, no gloomy face, as he said, with the momentary return of his everyday good spirits. Your mother and I mean to live and see Frank a great merchant. I shall leave you, my dear, to enlighten the son of our new projects while I walk over to the cottage. He stopped. His eyebrow contracted a little, and he looked aside hesitatingly at Mrs. Vanstone. What must you do at the cottage, Papa? asked Magdalen after having vainly waited for him to finish the sentence of his own accord. I must consult Frank's father, he said. You must not forget that Mr. Clair's consent is still wanting to settle this matter. And as the time presses, we don't know what difference he may not raise the sooner I see him the better. He gave that answer in a low, altered tones and rose from the chair in a half-relectant, half-resigned banner, which Magdalen observed the secret alarm. She glanced inquiringly at her mother. To all appearance, Mrs. Vanstone had been alarmed by the change in him also. She looked anxiously and uneasy. She turned her face away on the sofa pillow, turned it suddenly, as if she was in pain. Are you not well, Mama? asked Magdalen. Quite well, my love. Said Mrs. Vanstone, shortly and sharply, without turning around. Leave me a little. I only want rest. Magdalen went out with her father. Papa, she whispered anxiously, as they descended the stairs. You don't think Mr. Clair will say no? I can't tell beforehand, answered Mr. Vanstone. I hope he will say yes. There is no reason why he should say anything else. Is there? She put the question faintly, while she was getting his hat and stick, and he did not appear to hear her. Doubting whether she should repeat it or not, she accompanied him as far as the garden, on his way to Mr. Clair's cottage. As he stopped her on the lawn and sent her back to the house. You have nothing on your head, my dear, he said. If you want to be in the garden, don't forget how hot the sun is. Don't come out without your hat. He walked on toward the cottage. She waited a moment and looked after him. She missed the customary flourish of the stick. She saw his little scotch terrier, who'd run out at his heels, barking and capering about him unnoticed. He was out of spirits. He was strangely out of spirits. What did it mean? End of chapter 9, scene 1, recorded by Hannah Schoomburg from Marietta, Georgia. First scene, chapter 10 of No Name. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Linda Lee Paquette. No Name, by Wilkie Collins. First scene, chapter 10. On returning to the house, Magdalen felt her shoulders suddenly touched from behind as she crossed the hall. She turned and confronted her sister. Before she could ask any questions, Nora confusedly addressed her in these words. I beg your pardon. I beg you to forgive me. Magdalen looked at her sister in astonishment. All memory on her side of the sharp words which had passed between them in the shrubbery was lost in the new interests that now absorbed her. Lost as completely as if the angry interview had never taken place. Forgive you, she repeated amazingly. What for? I have heard of your new prospects, pursued Nora, speaking with a mechanical submissiveness of manner which seemed almost ungracious. I wish to set things right between us. I wish to say I was sorry for what happened. Will you forget it? Will you forget and forgive what happened in the shrubbery? She tried to proceed, but her inveterate reserve or perhaps her obstinate reliance on her own opinions silenced her at those last words. Her face clouded over on a sudden. Before her sister could answer her, she turned away abruptly and ran upstairs. The door of the library opened before Magdalen could follow her and Miss Garth advanced to express the sentiments proper to the occasion. They were not the mechanically submissive sentiments which Magdalen had just heard. Nora had struggled against her rooted distrust of Frank, in deference to the unanswerable decision of both her parents in his favor, and had suppressed the open expression of her antipathy, though the feeling itself remained unconquered. Miss Garth had made no such concession to the master and mistress of the house. She had hitherto held the position of a high authority on all domestic questions, and she flatly declined to get off her pedestal in deference to any change in the family's circumstances, no matter how amazing or how unexpected that change might be. Pray, accept my congratulations, said Miss Garth, bristling all over with implied objections to Frank. My congratulations and my apologies. When I caught you kissing Mr. Francis Clare in the summer house, I had no idea you were engaged in carrying out the intentions of your parents. I offered no opinion on the subject. I merely regret my own accidental appearance in the character of an obstacle to the course of true love, which appears to run smooth in summer houses, whatever Shakespeare may say to the contrary. Consider me for the future, if you please, as an obstacle removed. May you be happy. Miss Garth's lips closed on that last sentence like a trap, and Miss Garth's eyes looked ominously prophetic into the matrimonial future. If Magdalene's anxieties had not been far too serious to allow her the customary free use of her tongue, she would have been ready on the instant with an appropriately satirical answer. As it was, Miss Garth simply irritated her. Poo! she said, and ran upstairs to her sister's room. She knocked at the door, and there was no answer. She tried the door, and it resisted her from the inside. The sullen, unmanageable Nora was locked in. Under other circumstances Magdalene would not have been satisfied with knocking. She would have called through the door loudly and more loudly, till the house was disturbed, and she had carried her point. But the doubts and fears of the morning had unnerved her already. She went downstairs again softly, and took her hat from the stand in the hall. He told me to put my hat on. She said to herself, with a meek filial facility which was totally out of her character. She went into the garden, on the shrubbery side, and waited there to catch the first sight of her father on his return. Half an hour passed. Forty minutes passed, and then his voice reached her from among the distant trees. Coming to heel, she heard him call out loudly to the dog. Her face turned pale. He's angry with snap, she exclaimed to herself in a whisper. The next minute he appeared and viewed, walking rapidly, with his head down, and snap at his heels in disgrace. The sudden excess of her alarm as she observed those ominous signs of something wrong rallied her natural energy, and determined her desperately unknowing the worst. She walked straight forward to meet her father. Your face tells your news, she said faintly. Mr. Clare has been as heartless as usual. Mr. Clare has said no. Her father turned on her with a sudden severity, so entirely unparalleled in her experience of him that she started back in downright terror. Magdalene, he said, whenever you speak of my old friend and neighbor again, bear this in mind. Mr. Clare has just laid me under an obligation which I shall remember gratefully to the end of my life. He stopped suddenly after saying those remarkable words. Seeing that he had startled her, his natural kindness prompted him instantly to soften the reproof, and to end the suspense from which she was plainly suffering. Give me a kiss, my love, he resumed, and I'll tell you in return that Mr. Clare has said, yes. She attempted to thank him, but the sudden luxury of relief was too much for her. She could only cling round his neck in silence. He felt her trembling from head to foot, and said a few words to calm her. At the altered tones of his master's voice, Snapp's meek tail reappeared fiercely from between his legs, and Snapp's lungs modestly tested his position with a brief experimental bark. The dog's quaintly appropriate assertion of himself on his old footing was the interruption of all others which was best fitted to restore Magdalene to herself. She caught the shaggy little terrier up in her arms and kissed him next. You darling, she exclaimed, you're almost as glad as I am. She turned again to her father with a look of tender reproach. You frightened me, papa, she said. You were so unlike yourself. I shall be right again tomorrow, my dear. I am a little upset today. Not by me. No, no. By something you have heard at Mr. Clare's? Yes. Nothing you need alarm yourself about. Nothing that won't wear off by tomorrow. Let me go now, my dear. I have a letter to write, and I want to speak to your mother. He left her and went on to the house. Magdalene lingered a little on the lawn to feel all the happiness of her new sensations, then turned away toward the shrubbery to enjoy the higher luxury of communicating them. The dog followed her. She whistled and clapped her hands. Find him, she said, with beaming eyes. Find Frank! Snapp scampered into the shrubbery with a bloodthirsty snarl at starting. Perhaps he had mistaken his young mistress and considered himself her emissary in search of a rat. Meanwhile, Mr. Van Stone entered the house. He met his wife slowly descending the stairs, and advanced to give her his arm. How has it ended, she asked anxiously, as he led her to the sofa. Happily, as we hoped it would, answered her husband. My old friend has justified my opinion of him. Thank God! said Mrs. Van Stone fervently. Did you feel it, love? She asked, as her husband arranged the sofa pillows. Did you feel it as painfully as I feared you would? I had a duty to do, my dear, and I did it. After replying in those terms, he hesitated. Apparently, he had something more to say. Something, perhaps, on the subject of that passing uneasiness of mine which had been produced by his interview with Mr. Clare, and which Magdalen's questions had obliged him to acknowledge. A look at his wife decided his doubts in the negative. He only asked if she felt comfortable, and then turned away to leave the room. Must you go, she asked. I have a letter to write, my dear. Anything about Frank? No. Tomorrow will do for that. A letter to Mr. Pendrell. I want him here immediately. Business, I suppose? Yes, my dear. Business. He went out and shut himself into the little front room, close to the hall door, which was called his study. By nature and habit, the most procrastinating of letter writers, he now inconsistently opened his desk and took up the pen without a moment's delay. His letter was long enough to occupy three pages of no paper. It was written with a readiness of expression and a rapidity of hand, which seldom characterized his proceedings when engaged over his ordinary correspondence. He wrote the address as follows. Immediate, William Pendrell Esquire, Searle Street, Lincoln's Inn, London. Then pushed the letter away from him, and sat at the table, drawing lines on the blotting paper with his pen, lost in thought. No, he said to himself, I can do nothing more till Pendrell comes. He rose. His face brightened as he put the stamp on the envelope. The writing of the letter had sensibly relieved him, and his whole bearing showed it as he left the room. On the doorstep, he found Nora and Miss Garth setting forth together for a walk. Which way are you going? he asked. Anywhere near the post office? I wish you would post this letter for me, Nora. It is very important, so important, that I hardly like to trust it to Thomas as usual. Nora at once took charge of the letter. If you look, my dear, continued her father, you will see that I am writing to Mr. Pendrell. I expect him here tomorrow afternoon. Will you give the necessary directions, Miss Garth? Mr. Pendrell will sleep here tomorrow night and stay over Sunday. Wait a minute. Today is Friday. Surely I had an engagement for Saturday afternoon. He consulted his pocketbook and read over one of the entries with a look of annoyance. Grail see meals, three o'clock Saturday. Just the time when Pendrell will be here, and I must be at home to see him. How can I manage it? Monday will be too late for my business at Grail see. I'll go to-day instead, and take my chance of catching the miller at his dinnertime. He looked at his watch. No time for driving. I must do it by railway. If I go at once, I shall catch the down-train at our station, and get on to Grail see. Take care of the letter, Nora. I won't keep dinner waiting. If the return train doesn't suit, I'll borrow a gig and get back in that way. As he took up his hat, Magdalen appeared at the door, returning from her interview with Frank. The hurry of her father's movements attracted her attention, and she asked him where he was going. To Grail see, replied Mr. Vanstone, Your business, Miss Magdalen, has gotten the way of mine, and mine must give way to it. He spoke those parting words in his old hearty manner, and left them with the old characteristic flourish of his trusty stick. My business, said Magdalen. I thought my business was done. Miss Garth pointed significantly to the letter in Nora's hand. Your business, beyond all doubt, she said. Mr. Pendrell is coming to-morrow, and Mr. Vanstone seems remarkably anxious about it. Law and its attendant troubles already. Governances who look in at summer-house doors are not the only obstacles to the course of true love. Parchment is sometimes an obstacle. I hope you may find parchment as pliable as I am. I wish you well through it. Now, Nora. Miss Garth's second shaft struck as harmless as the first. Magdalen had returned to the house a little vexed. Her interview with Frank, having been interrupted by a messenger from Mr. Clare, sent to summon the son into the father's presence. Although it had been agreed at the private interview between Mr. Vanstone and Mr. Clare, that the questions discussed that morning should not be communicated to the children until the year of probation was at an end. And although, under these circumstances, Mr. Clare had nothing to tell Frank which Magdalen could not communicate to him much more agreeably. The philosopher was not the less resolved on personally informing his son of the parental concession which rescued him from Chinese exile. The result was a sudden summons to the cottage, which startled Magdalen, but which did not appear to take Frank by surprise. His filial experience penetrated the mystery of Mr. Clare's motives easily enough. When my father's in spirits, he said, sulkily, he likes to bully me about my good luck. This message means that he's going to bully me now. Don't go, suggested Magdalen. I must, rejoined Frank. I shall never hear the last of it if I don't. He's primed and loaded, and he means to go off. He went off once when the engineer took me. He went off twice when the office in the city took me. And he's going off thrice, now you've taken me. If it wasn't for you, I should wish I had never been born. Yes, your father's been kind to me, I know, and I should have gone to China if it hadn't been for him. I'm sure I'm very much obliged. Of course, we have no right to expect anything else. Still, it's discouraging to keep us waiting a year, isn't it? Magdalen stopped his mouth by a summary process, to which even Frank submitted gratefully. At the same time, she did not forget to set down his discontent to the right side. How fun he is of me, she thought. A year's waiting is quite a hardship to him. She returned to the house, secretly regretting that she had not heard more of Frank's complimentary complaints. Miss Garse's elaborate satire, addressed to her while she was in this frame of mind, was a purely gratuitous waste of Miss Garse's breath. What did Magdalen care for satire? What do youth and love ever care for except themselves? She never even said as much as poo this time. She laid aside her hat in serene silence, and sauntered languidly into the morning room to keep her mother company. She lunched on dire for bootings of a quarrel between Frank and his father, with accidental interruptions in the shape of cold chicken and cheesecakes. She trifled away half an hour at the piano, and played in that time selections from the songs of Mendelssohn, the Mazurkas of Chopin, the operas of Verde, and the sonatas of Mozart. All of whom had combined together on this occasion and produced one immortal work, entitled Frank. She closed the piano and went up to her room to dream away the hours luxuriously in visions of her married future. The green shutters were closed, the easy chair was pushed in front of the class, the maid was summoned as usual, and the comb assisted the mistresses' reflections through the medium of the mistresses' hair, till heat and idleness asserted their narcotic influences together, and Magdalen fell asleep. It was past three o'clock when she woke. On going downstairs again, she found her mother, Nora, and Miss Garth all sitting together, enjoying the shade and the coolness under the open portico in front of the house. Nora had the railway timetable in her hand. They had been discussing the chances of Mr. Van Stone's catching the return train and getting back in good time. That topic had led them next to his business errand at Grailsea, an errand of kindness as usual, undertaken for the benefit of the miller, who had been his old farm servant, and who was now heart-pressed by serious pecuniary difficulties. From this they had glided insensibly into a subject often repeated among them, and never exhausted by repetition, the praise of Mr. Van Stone himself. Each one of the three had some experience of her own to relate of his simple, generous nature. The conversation seemed to be almost painfully interesting to his wife. She was too near the time of her trial now not to feel nervously sensitive to the one subject which always held the foremost place in her heart. Her eyes overflowed as Magdalen joined the little group under the portico. Her frail hand trembled as it signed to her youngest daughter to take the vacant chair by her side. We were talking of your father, she said softly. Oh, my love, if your married life is only as happy. Her voice failed her. She put her handkerchief hurriedly over her face and rested her head on Magdalen's shoulder. Nora looked appealingly to Ms. Garth, who had once led the conversation back to the more trivial subject of Mr. Van Stone's return. We have all been wondering, she said, with a significant look at Magdalen, whether your father will leave Grailsey in time to catch the train, or whether he will miss it and be obliged to drive back. What do you say? I say Papa will miss the train, replied Magdalen, taking Ms. Garth's hint with her customary quickness. The last thing he attends to at Grailsey will be the business that brings him there. Whenever he has business to do, he always puts it off to the last moment, doesn't he, Mama? The question roused her mother exactly as Magdalen had intended it it should. Not when his errand is an errand of kindness, said Ms. Van Stone. He has gone to help the miller in a very pressing difficulty. And don't you know what he'll do, persisted Magdalen? He'll romp with the miller's children and gossip with the mother and hobnob with the father. At the last moment, when he has got five minutes left to catch the train, he'll say, Let's go into the counting-house and look at the books. He'll find the books dreadfully complicated. He'll suggest sending for an accountant. He'll settle the business off-hand by lending the money in the meantime. He'll jog back comfortably in the miller's gig, and he'll tell us all how pleasant the lanes were in the cool of the evening. The little character sketch, which these words drew, was too faithful a likeness not to be recognized. Mrs. Van Stone showed her appreciation of it by a smile. When your father returns, she said, we will put your account of his proceedings to the test. I think, she continued, rising languidly from her chair. I had better go indoors again now and rest on the sofa till he comes back. The little group under the portico broke up. Magdalen slipped away into the garden to hear Frank's account of the interview with his father. The other three ladies entered the house together. When Mrs. Van Stone was comfortably established on the sofa, Nora and Miss Garth left her to repose, and withdrew to the library to look over the last parcel of books from London. It was a quiet, cloudless summer's day. The heat was tempered by a light western breeze. The voices of laborers at work in a field near reached the house cheerfully. The clock bell of the village church, as it struck the quarters, floated down the wind with a clearer ring, a louder melody than usual. Sweet odors from field and flower garden, stealing in at the open windows, filled the house with their fragrance. And the birds in Nora's aviary upstairs, saying the song of their happiness, exultantly in the sun. As the church clock struck the quarter past four, the morning room door opened, and Mrs. Van Stone crossed the hall alone. She had tried vainly to compose herself. She was too restless to lie still and sleep. For a moment she directed her steps toward the portico, then turned and looked about her, doubtful where to go or what to do next. While she was still hesitating, the half-open door of her husband's study attracted her attention. The room seemed to be in sad confusion. Drawers were left open. Coats and hats, account books and papers, pipes and fishing rods were all scattered about together. She went in and pushed the door to, but so gently that she still left it ajar. It will amuse me to put his room to rights, she thought to herself. I should like to do something for him before I am down on my bed helpless. She began to arrange his drawers, and found his banker's book lying open in one of them. My poor dear, how careless he is! The servants might have seen all his affairs if I had not happened to have looked in. She set the drawers right, and then turned to the multifarious litter on a side table. A little old-fashioned music book appeared among the scattered papers, with her name written in it in faded ink. She blushed like a young girl in the first happiness of the discovery. How good he is to me! He remembers my poor old music book and keeps it for my sake. As she sat down by the table and opened the book, the bygone time came back to her in all its tenderness. The clock struck the half-hour, struck the three-quarters, and still she sat there with the music book on her lap, dreaming happily over the old songs, thinking gratefully of the golden days when his hand had turned the pages for her, when his voice had whispered the words which no woman's memory ever forgets. Nora roused herself from the volume she was reading, and glanced at the clock on the library mantelpiece. If papa comes back by the railway, she said, he will be here in ten minutes. Miss Garth started, and looked up drowsily from the book which was just dropping out of her hand. I don't think he will come by train, she replied. He will jog back as Magdalen flippantly expressed it in the miller's gig. As she said the words, there was a knock at the library door. The footman appeared and addressed himself to Miss Garth. A person wishes to see you, mom. Who is it? I don't know, mom. A stranger to me, a respectable looking man, and he said he particularly wished to see you. Miss Garth went out into the hall. The footman closed the library door after her, and withdrew down the kitchen stairs. The man stood just inside the door on the mat. His eyes wandered, his face was pale. He looked ill. He looked frightened. He trifled nervously with his cap, and shifted it backward and forward from one hand to the other. You wanted to see me, said Miss Garth. I beg your pardon, ma'am. You are not Mrs. Van Stone, are you? Certainly not. I am Miss Garth. Why do you ask the question? I am employed in the clerk's office at Grailsea Station. Yes. I am sent here. He stopped again. His wandering eyes looked down at the mat, and his restless hands wrung his cap harder and harder. He moistened his dry lips and tried once more. I am sent here on a very serious errand. Serious to me? Serious to all in this house. Miss Garth took one step nearer to him. Took one steady look at his face. She turned cold in the summer heat. Stop, she said, with a sudden distrust, and glanced aside anxiously at the door of the morning-room. It was safely closed. Tell me the worst, and don't speak loud. There has been an accident. Where? On the railway, close to Grailsea Station. The up-train to London? No. The down-train at 150. God Almighty help us! The train, Mr. Van Stone, traveled by to Grailsea. The same. I was sent here by the up-train. The line was just cleared in time for it. They wouldn't write. They said I must see Miss Garth and tell her. There are seven passengers, badly hurt, and two. The next word failed on his lips. He raised his hand in the dead silence, with eyes that opened wide in horror. He raised his hand and pointed over Miss Garth's shoulder. She turned a little and looked back. Face to face with her, on the threshold of the study-door, stood the mistress of the house. She held her old music-book clutched fast, mechanically in both hands. She stood, the specter of herself, with a dreadful vacancy in her eyes, with a dreadful stillness in her voice. She repeated the man's last words. Seven passengers, badly hurt, and two. Her tortured fingers relaxed their hold. The book dropped from them. She sank forward heavily. Miss Garth caught her before she fell, caught her, and turned upon the man, with the wife's swooning body in her arms, to hear the husband's fate. The harm is done, she said. You may speak out. Is he wounded or dead? Dead. End of Chapter 10, First Scene. Recording by Linda Lee Paquette.