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

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

“If you had seen how Magdalen suffered, you would never doubt her again.  I had to take her from the last resting-place of our father and mother almost by force.  Before we were out of the churchyard she broke from me and ran back.  She dropped on her knees at the grave; tore up from it passionately a handful of grass; and said something to herself, at the same moment, which, though I followed her instantly, I did not get near enough to hear.  She turned on me in such a frenzied manner, when I tried to raise her from the ground—­she looked at me with such a fearful wildness in her eyes—­that I felt absolutely terrified at the sight of her.  To my relief, the paroxysm left her as suddenly as it had come.  She thrust away the tuft of grass into the bosom of her dress, and took my arm and hurried with me out of the churchyard.  I asked her why she had gone back—­I asked what those words were which she had spoken at the grave.  ‘A promise to our dead father,’ she answered, with a momentary return of the wild look and the frenzied manner which had startled me already.  I was afraid to agitate her by saying more; I left all other questions to be asked at a fitter and a quieter time.  You will understand from this how terribly she suffers, how wildly and strangely she acts under violent agitation; and you will not interpret against her what she said or did when you saw her on Wednesday last.